Blogs

Today we are proud to release the beta version of EXmaps.com. We have been working on it for many months and now we are finally ready to release it to the public.

What is EXmaps?

EXmaps cater to the APM/Pixhawk users. In short, the current version serves as a digital drone logbook.

You get to create account, and upload logs tagged to specific UAV so that cumulative data such as flight time and flight distance can be tabulated according to UAV. 

Here are some features that we build:

1) Calculation of actual flight time and distance

2) Presenting log data in interactive graphs, maps and sliders

3) Automated historical weather data base on time of flight

4) Ability to make individual logs public with comments function (otherwise all logs are private)

This is a beta release because there might still be bugs and it only support dataflash logs now. We chose dataflash logs over tlogs because dataflash logs is more complete and does not suffer from data loss due to signal loss. We would like to get the community’s feedback on this service before continuing our development work. You can register for an account at www.exmaps.com

Pricing

We are not certain how we are going to recover our development cost now but what we can promise is that we will always keep 1 drone worth of data free. Forever. Irregardless of the number of logs uploaded as long as it belongs to 1 drone. 

Why

We came from www.avetics.com and have been using APM for a long time. One of the things we would like to improve is maintenance and ease of sharing drone logs. We hope that users can better plan maintenance schedule base on flight time etc and better catch issues with the drone before disaster happens.  

A note of thanks

Thanks to Kevin Hester who created Droneshare. It inspired us to do EXmaps. Also thanks to the many developers at DIYDrones & 3DRobotics. 

Do give us a shout out at hello@exmaps.com !

Here at DIYDrones, our community constitutes only a portion of a much larger movement; that of empowered individuals and groups. Music artist, M.I.A., has embraced these types of movements and incorporated an onslaught of DIY imagery in her latest video release, Double Bubble Trouble. HooperFly was fortunate enough to be involved, not only with the DBT video project, but with a live television performance on Late Night with Seth Meyers. It's been very eye-opening and an amazing experience to incorporate multi rotors into art and media environments. There are many dimensions to the discussion around thoughtful use of multi rotor technology, a subset of the UAV/Drone ecosystem. With respect to the video and the live TV performance, technical, ethical, and legal issues were all addressed prior to each event. There were technical and environmental challenges that had to be overcome in both situations but, at the end-of-the-day, the use of the multi rotors was a success. One of the main contributors to the success of these events was the ability to create a collaborative environment focused on mitigating risks while creating something visually interesting. It was cool seeing peace drones over London as well as prop-buffered rotors buzzing about NBC studios in New York. If we commit to a level of excellence, I think we, as individuals and groups, can do many, many more interesting things with these rapidly evolving technologies.

Inspire and Acknowledge,

~HooperFly

Via sUASNews, a very cool demo of using a 3D printing pen to rapid prototype (draw!) a quadcopter:

Are you traveling somewhere with your UAV or drone? Want to become more aware of potential issues at checkpoints?  This page offers links to relevant DIY Drones content back through 2007. 

Do you have direct, personal experience with checkpoints to, from or within your country? Why not share on this blog post to help other DIY Drones members avoid a problem?

Have a great Summer!

Link to article and video

Heres a piece CBS did this morning on conservation and drones based on our work (falconunmanned.com) with the World Wildlife Fund.  They didn't do any screen captures of the GCS but we are happing to be flying 3DR products and using Mission Planner!

COMHER, STRATASYS International distribution, is printing Barcelona 3D printed UAV.

FORTUS 400mc is able to print this 15dm wingspan and 10dm fuse length in only 8 parts in the same print volume.

Material ABS30

Duration: 130h

See the printer in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Kj-ZA4FFCI

Hi guys,

Most of the AUAV-X1 tests passed just fine. The tests were so many, therefore I represent the most important ones.

For the moment the W25Q80 NAND Flash driver is not yet tested, that's why we use FM25V02 FRAM on board instead.

For the moment AUAV-X1 works with either ST IMU set ( L3GD20H + LSM303D ) or Invensense IMU ( MPU6000 ) + external magnetometer HMC5883L. Real flight tests ahead.

What I can say after all tests done:

1. AUAV-X1 is fully functional as expected with either ST IMU or Invensense IMU;

2. AUAV-X1 is compatible with PIXHAWK firmware and works just fine with QGC;

3. The microIMU board must be redesigned to have ST + Invensense combo onboard. Stacking ST IMU and MPU6000 IMU impossible;

4. A case has been designed and some vibration tests have to be performed;

5. Real flight tests ahead when the rain stops. The Balkans are floaded;

6. W25Q80 NAND Flash driver has to be tested.

We started fulfilling the preorders with ST IMU.

Many thanks to Lorenz for his support during all the tests.

Thank you Lorenz!

Best regards

Nick

Forbes reports on the flood of new job listings for Amazon's Prime Air team, which is a real thing:

There are interesting details to glean from the engineering postings, such as the fact that some of  the drone development engineers will be based in San Francisco, or that Seattle-based Amazon right now is more concerned about building out its expertise in software, rather than hardware.

For the fullest glimpses of what project leaders Gur Kimchi and Daniel Buchmueller have in mind, though, turn to the non-technical listings. What caught my eye are notices for  full-time communications manager and a full-time patent lawyer to help get this project off the ground. The jaunty tone of those listings underscore Bezos’s willingness to charge ahead, no matter what everyone else is saying.

Let’s start by dissecting the communications manager listing. The sunny news first:  Amazon defines this as a “high-visibility position where you’ll work directly with Amazon senior executives. . . . You move very fast and think big. ” After all, Amazon wants a media chief who can “ drive massive awareness for Amazon Prime Air.”

Now for the tricky stuff. Amazon also wants candidates who are “comfortable dealing with ambiguity and able to form a cohesive and effective outcome from potentially incongruous facts.” Take a closer look at those last three words. You don’t see those in many job notices, do you? Amazon isn’t tipping its hand any further at this point, but it’s safe to assume that “incongruous facts” might include drones that crash, drop the shipment prematurely or otherwise malfunction.

Right now, no one knows for sure how well or poorly drones will perform. It’s natural for reporters to speculate on possible problems.  But the next section of Amazon’s job description makes clear that when the facts aren’t in yet, it wants a media chief who can focus attention on what can go right, rather than what can go wrong.

With so much at stake, Amazon wants more than an old-fashioned “no comment.” Amazon is looking for a PR alchemist — someone who can magically turn turmoil into good news. And judging by the applicant tally on this LinkedIn version of Amazon’s ad, lots of people are jumping at the opportunity. As of May 18, some 23 people had applied for the post. (I’ll update the total in a week or so.)

Meanwhile, Amazon’s hunt for a drone-patent lawyer is instructive, too. Bear in mind that Amazon already is famous for its gung-h0 approach to patenting the intellectual property (IP) associated with more than 1,000 of its online retailing ideas. Now it looks as if Amazon wants to build up either an unshakeable edge over other retailers and shipping companies — or a set of proprietary technologies that it can profitably license to anyone else wanting to use drones.

As Amazon declares in its patent-lawyer job notice: “Responsibilities include direct client counseling, third party IP investigations and actively working with outside counsel to manage filing, prosecuting and maintaining our growing US and foreign patent portfolio.”

Finally, if you’re eager to start your career in drones, Amazon is hiring at least one research scientist intern. But that’s going to be a hotly contested spot: by LinkedIn’s tally, at least 48 people already are vying for that job.

Great to see the latest progress on Ilya's supercool iQuad tilt-rotor at Maker Faire. Carbon fiber wings are looking good!

Here's an video of an earlier version in flight:

We had a blast at Maker Faire, which was the best one yet. This video captures the spirit of it perfectly, from the Game of Drones battles to the fire-breathing sculptures. Many thanks to the Maker Faire team for letting us do this!

Please report bugs on the ardupilot forum

Having a background in electronics I wanted to build my own flightcontroller. At the same time I decided to build a new quadcopter. Having bought a 3d printer from Ultimaker, I printed a quadcopter frame inspired on the original Crossfire design from MickeyB (thingiverse).

printed part

Inspired by the ArduCopter, KK2.0 and AeroQuad firmware I wrote my own code using the PSOC3 (Programmable System on Chip) platform form Cypress. The custom flightcontroller circuit board was fabricated using Elektor printservice.

assembled flightcontroller

The 9DOF sensor stick of Sparkfun is mounted on top of circuit.

topview mounted flightcontroller

A cheap Nokia 5110 LCD is used as a simple flightcontroller UI. A RS232 interface links the flightcontroller to the PC in order to load the calculated/calibrated offsets and PID parameters using a simple python script.

python quadcopter pc ui

3d graph of a calibrated magnetometer sensor

Finally I tweeked a little bit the FrSky Taranis transmitter in order to display the pitch, roll and heading calculated by the flightcontroller on the telemetry page.

telemetry screen Taranis

The pitch is dispalyed as T1 (temperature1), the roll as T2 (temperature2) and the heading as Curr (current).

At present first testflights are carried out.

MAVProxy is powerful ground station software that excellently complements your favorite GUI ground station, such as Mission Planner, APM Planner etc. A key driver for me to look into MAVProxy was it's capability to forward the signal from your UAV over the network via UDP to multiple other ground station software on other devices. For example; you can run a ground station on a laptop next to your antenna and forward via wifi to a smartphone/tablet which lets you easily relocate to launch into wind before heading back to your fixed antenna. I have also used it to send telemetry data to a friend acting as spotter several kilometers away (via 4G vpn) during a longer flight so that he could monitor the entire flight and determine where to look to find the aircraft in flight.

Alas it is not the easiest to understand how to run on Windows and I had no luck finding a single step by step guide for the non technical, so I have had a go at creating one. This guide will let you successfully set up MAVProxy to allow forwarding via network interfaces and usage via command line. There may be other ways to get this running and you may need other packages as per the official MAVProxy documentation at http://tridge.github.io/MAVProxy/ in order to use more advanced functions. No warranty responsibility for damage etc. Full credit to Andrew Tridgell and all other contributors to MAVProxy and the other software used here.

Step 1 - Check you can connect to your UAV

Before starting anything make sure you can make a direct connection to your aircraft with your normal Ground Station software on the PC in question. Check that you know the correct COM port and baudrate for the modem attached to your laptop as we will need that info later.

Step 2 - Install Python

Download and install Python 2.7 - Windows x86 MSI Installer works regardless of OS/CPU type. Install with default settings to C:\Python27\

Step 3 - Install Pyserial

Download and install Pyserial 2.7 - Win32 for Python 2.x (2.4...2.7) - Use default settings to the C:\Python27\ directory.

Step 4 - Install and set up MAVProxy

Download MAVProxy latest .tar.gz file and extract (Install WinRAR if you have no suitable archive extractor) to C:\Python27\

Once extracted you should be able to open up the path C:\Python27\MAVProxy-1.3.3\MAVProxy and see a file called mavproxy.py

Right click on mavproxy.py and select Edit with IDLE. On line 20 of the file remove the # in front of the line sys.path.append(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__)), '..')) so that it appears as below

Step 5 - Install pymavlink

Download pymavlink latest .tar.gz file and extract to C:\Python27\MAVProxy-1.3.3\MAVProxy

This will create a directory in the above folder called something like "pymavlink-1.1.29". Rename this folder to pymavlink.

Step 6 - Ready to run!

Check your radio modem is connected via USB, the aircraft modem and APM are powered and ensure any other ground station software is closed.

Open a command prompt window (Click start, type cmd and then press enter) and then enter cd "C:\Python27\MAVProxy-1.3.3\MAVProxy" and push enter. The command prompt will open that directory.

Then type mavproxy.py --master="com14" --baudrate 57600 (replacing the com port and baudrate with your local modem settings) and then push enter.

If everything has worked you should see MAVProxy start up and some basic flight data such as mode and current waypoint appear. Occasionally some data does seem to result in glitching and odd characters appearing onscreen but this does not seem to affect reliability or performance.

Enter a command such as mode FBWA  and press enter. You should see MAVLink report the mode change and notice your aircraft change behavior into that mode.

The full list of MAVLink commands can be found here if you want to experiment further with the command line.

To exit MAVLink press Control+C together.

Step 7 - Forwarding over network

To forward the MAV data over the network including to a local program on your PC we simply need to add some extra parameters when starting MAVProxy via the command line. 

To connect with a local ground station software such as Mission Planner start MAVProxy as above with the command mavproxy.py --master="com14" --baudrate 57600 --out 127.0.0.1:14550 and press enter.

Then open Mission Planner and select UDP and click connect. Clink OK on the default prompt for port number (14550) and you should see mission planner start downloading parameters and connecting to your UAV.

Finally you can add the IP address of any computer to forward the telemetry stream onwards to other ground stations.

1) On the local network/wifi you will need to ensure there is no firewall on the client PC stopping the incoming stream to your ground station software.

2) Add --out IP_ADDRESS:14550 to the end of the mavproxy.py command. You can add as many separate --out parameters as you want depending on how many extra ground stations you are running.

3) Set each ground station to listen for UDP packets on port 14550

Step 8 - Simple startup using a batch file

To simplify the starting up of MAVProxy I have written a simple 5 line batch file:

 Mavproxy Startup Batch File

You should edit this to reflect your local port, baudrate and include any additional IP addresses to forward the data to.

Simply save this anywhere and double click to start MAVProxy (assuming you have followed the instructions above).

I really hope this is helpful to some people. It took me a while to figure it out and hope my learning experience can benefit others. 

Just wanted to give everyone a quick update. The Albatross prototypes are flying as we speak and we are amidst testing and refining the airframe for production with quite a few additional products in the works. More information to come soon.

For those of you who have been attempting to get 6 flight modes out of your Spektrum radio, I have finally figured a method to make it work with the "Flap" and "Elev D/R" toggle switches. I won't bore you with details but attached are my instructions to reconfigure your radio (mine is a DX7s) to allow only one channel to be used to toggle up to 6 modes. I prefer to keep Channel 7 available for other things.

These are the values (PWM) I came up with

Elev D/R – 0                 Flap – 0                      Mission Planner – Flight Mode 6                PWM - 1932
                                                  1                                                                            3                              1395
                                                  2                                                                            1                              1136

Elev D/R – 1                 Flap – 0                      Mission Planner – Flight Mode 5                PWM - 1715
                                                  1                                                                            4                              1530
                                                  2                                                                            2                              1299

Spektrum%20DX7s%20-%206%20Flight%20Mode%20Channel%20Configuration%20Procedures.docx

Enjoy!
Doug W.

If you're going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area this weekend, don't miss Maker Faire on Saturday and Sunday. In the Expo Hall, circled above, you'll find the 3D Robotics booth, where you can meet some of the team, along with the Game of Drones team,Virtual Robotix and many others.

I'm going to be giving a mainstage speech at 5:30pm on Saturday on "Punk Rock and the Origins of the Maker Movement", something I know way too much about (misbegotten past) ;-)

Video of the 2014 SUSB Expo - Free for the public to view. Day 1:

Day 2:

Both days of presentations from the Expo. Jonathan Downey, Jim Williams (FAA), Chris Anderson, Gabe Ladd. 

After HK's Mini clone, Here is another APM mini  clone.

Here you can read more about it.

Specs are not mention , I suspect if it is using same 2560 Mega.

With GPS it is only $81 , more cheaper than HKs.

Did it with trying on my beloved copters ?

This sounds like good news, but we'll have to see the details to know for sure. From Bloomberg:

U.S. aviation regulators said they are considering a streamlined approval process for flights of small unmanned drones for film making, utilities inspections, farming and other low-risk operations.

With the first regulation allowing commercial drone flights at least a year away, the Federal Aviation Administration is looking at ways to grant approvals for limited applications before then, said Jim Williams, chief of the agency’s unmanned aircraft division. The FAA is already fielding requests, he said in a speech in Orlando, Florida, today.

While such flights aren’t yet permitted, businesses have already been using drones to film sporting events, promote real estate and map land. Industries including agriculture, film making and inspections of utilities and oil and gas facilities have now approached the agency and are considering asking for a formal process for expedited approvals to fly, Williams said.

It expects to propose a rule allowing commercial drones weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms) by November, according to a schedule of rulemaking efforts.

Read the rest here. 

As there's surely a relation between the maker scene and the UAV scene, I thought that might be interesting.

Fenner Drives came out with pretty tough but flexible TEP filament for 3D-printing a couple of months ago. I can imagine a ton of applications for this stuff in UAVs, like anti-vibration mounts or protective shells for autopilots, cameras, etc...