The world's first 3D Printer designed to print Carbon Fiber.
Waltham, MA @ www.markforged.com
Thanks Paul.
"The rise of autonomous flying robots has piqued the interest of everyone down to US TV personality Martha Stewart, who told Tech Crunch she would like her life “run by drones.”
For those without deep pockets, however, getting in on the UAV fun isn't always easy—drones aren't cheap, nor are the parts. But a growing number of websites are trying to make drones more accessible by helping users build their own at a reasonable cost. Joshua Allen Johnson was inspired to start his own do-it-yourself drone universe after working as an assistant administrator to Chris Anderson, the former Wired editor who is now behind the well-known amateur drone-building site DIY Drones... "
(Photo via Tyler Olsen) (Article By
To read the fully story visit: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/an-open-source-community-wants-to-fix-your-drone-with-3d-printed-parts
The Cyclodrone could keep cyclists safe on the road.
From Business Insider:
For some, the word "drone" may conjure images of scary flying machines going off to battle. Many researchers, however, are looking at new ways of using drones here in the U.S., and they could soon be more common than you'd expect.
With the unveiling of four new unmanned aircraft concepts, the industrial design team at frog is looking to clean up the drone's image.
"They can go places that we can't easily or safely go. The vantage point they can get as an extension of our field of view is something that's very valuable in first response situations and even everyday life," frog interaction designer Eric Boam said to Business Insider. "That ability is the root of their ability to do good."
Frog hopes to demonstrate these positive applications with their four new concept designs, and they all look like something out of a sci-fi movie.
One, dubbed the Cyclodrone, was inspired by one designer's frequent rides in the hills of Oakland, Calif. The concept calls for a drone that would fly in front of and behind cyclists to alert drivers of their approach.
"You see cyclists but it's often not until it's too late," Cormac Eubanks, who headed the survival drone design team, said to Business Insider. "Any advance warning could make a difference."
The Cyclodrone would be connected to a cyclist's phone via Bluetooth and would follow a preprogrammed route. Still, Eubanks admits that a more powerful battery and efficient motor would have to be developed for the Cyclodrone to become a reality.
Another survival drone, named the Firestorm, would be able to fly into burning buildings to give firefighters a better assessment of conditions and even find people trapped inside.
The Firestorm could help first responders.
"We're envisioning one that could be thermally insulated and go inside hot environments, so that if something happens, it's not the loss of life of a firefighter, just a piece of technology," Eubanks said. "The loss to human life would be considerably less."
There's also the Snow Cyclops, which could be a cheaper and safer alternative to current avalanche control technologies, and the Hummingbird and Beetle, an autonomous farming system that could potentially open up land previously inaccessible for farming.
The Snow Cyclops was designed to prevent avalanches.
While we probably won't see these drones fighting fires in the next few months, the frog team says that a future filled with helpful drones could only be a few years off.
"Right now it's just a concept, a kind of blue-sky approach to how we could create drones that were less intimidating," Eubanks said. "There is a level of engineering and technical scrutiny we would need to make these a reality."
Among the main concerns are communication and safety — they would have to figure out how to keep the drones from running into people, landmarks, and each other, for one. They aren't any legal guidelines for the use of drones in everyday life, either.
"A lot of things need to happen for there to be that ubiquity," Eubanks said.
The public's attitude towards unmanned aircraft would have to go through a change as well, though the designers are optimistic that this could happen over time.
"As drones evolve and their look and feel changes to more readily show their purpose...it will be easier for people to accept them," Boam said.
Eubanks agreed that people's relationship to drones could change, comparing it to other technologies that seemed intimidating in the past.
"A lot of technologies start as military applications, like GPS started as a way to direct fleets and military units," Eubanks said. "So I think drones have that same potential."
Amazing to see this picture, which is from the Tahoe ski resort we often visit (now totally devoid of snow). A drone in this familiar square brings both the mainstreaming of drones and the severity of current California drought into sharp focus for me.
From the Tahoe Daily Tribune
SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. (AP) — A Nevada-based research group recently acquired a cloud-seeding drone with hopes of increasing precipitation in the Tahoe/Truckee region.
The Desert Research Institute came to Heavenly Village this month to show off its new unmanned aircraft, which has the ability to release silver iodide into a storm and generate additional rain or snowfall.
DRI estimates that ground-based cloud seeding towers, which have been operating in the area for several years, already produce an additional 10 percent of water on average in the Lake Tahoe and Truckee regions, associate research professor Jeff Tilley said.
Fallon and the Walker River Basin are areas being eyed for November drone testing. Tilley said he’d also like to see drone operations in the Lake Tahoe region in the future.
“We would like to be able to supplement our ground-seeding operations in the Tahoe/Truckee basin with the drone,” he told the Tahoe Daily Tribune
DRI has been performing cloud-seeding operations in the area since the 1960s, and it has been using them for the direct benefit of water resources since the mid-’80s.
Tilley said that with the help of a drone — a more efficient means of extracting moisture from clouds — there is potential to produce even more water in an area that’s experiencing a drought.
“One of the things we want to do with the initial tests of the drone is to come up with an estimate of additional water under that methodology,” he said of combining drone and ground-based operations.
Steven Hemphill, spokesman for Sierra-at-Tahoe Ski Resort, said the company supports efforts to bring more snow if the methods don’t harm the environment.
“Anything to improve moisture, we do definitely get behind,” he said, “as long as there’s no adverse effects on the environment.”
Sierra-at-Tahoe was open and offered guests top to bottom skiing on 23 trails earlier this month. However, a lack of snow this season has led some employees to scoop buckets of snow out of the woods and cover patches on trails at times.
“We’re all in favor of getting a few more drops here,” Hemphill said.
DRI recognizes the need for additional precipitation, but the company won’t run the drone system until it’s ready, Tilley said. In other words, it will be a while before anyone sees the drone flying near Tahoe.
“That is possible down the road,” he said, “but that’s a ways off.”
(via sUASNews)
Warning: Lots of hi res images!
This is my entry for T3! I intern in an NSF funded lab which uses multicopters for ecological research. More specifically: we do photogrammetry in Agisoft Photoscan to produce LiDAR like point clouds. We're based out of UMBC, which is the campus shown above. I'd already been thinking about doing a full campus scan, and when I saw that T3 was going to be based on 3D modelling I knew what to do. So here's my scan, I hope you like it!
The Rig &The Mission:
The rig is a Mikrokopter Okto framed Arducopter. Parts list available here. The specs are as follows:
It can fly safely for 30 minutes (and a max linear distance of 8 kilometers at a target velocity of 7m/s) using this setup.
The Camera is a Canon Powershot ELPH 520, mounted in a waterproof case. The case is no longer waterproof because it has been lightened. It's main function is to provide a stable and consistent mount for the camera. The case is mounted to the underside of the frame using M3 plastic standoffs and rubber vibration dampers. Because CHDK is not available for this model of camera, the shutter button is held down with a thin velcro strap. In sequential shooting mode, this results in a constant 2 still frames/second.
Due to the distances involved, the campus had to be divided into three missions of approximately 6km each. The mission specs were 100 meters above ground level (to stay well above rooftop level but also well below 400 ft.) 39m apart tracks for 75% side overlap between photos.
Download Mission Planner Files.
The flights went extremely well. Each flight was fully automatic. The only human intervention was switching to AUTO mode while on the ground, and disabling the copter once it had landed. Line of sight was maintained on the copter at all times and I was standing by to take control if necessary. Please note that the KML files do no show height properly: the height above the ground is shown as height above sea level. So the tracks are missing about 61M of height in the Google Earth representation.
Download the Google Earth File Shown Above.
Download the Raw Dataflash and Tlogs.
This is an example of a typical image captured by the camera. In this photoset, I noticed that my pictures were somewhat motion blurred. This is likely due to the overcast lighting conditions triggering longer exposure times. In bright sunlight, images are usually sharper in my experience. Solutions to this include vibration damping the camera better, and using a higher quality camera.
In total, 5443 useful pictures were used in the scan. Additional pictures from the ascent, landing, and going to and from home were discarded.
The Workflow:
The photos were georeferenced using a custom Python script and run through Agisoft Photoscan to produce 3D models.
1. I manually discarded extraneous photos. Due to the camera setup with the shutter button held down (for maximum fps), pictures were taken for the entire duration of all three flights. I trimmed out the pictures from the takeoffs, landings, and going to and from the first and last waypoint. This leaves only the pictures taken along the vertical tracks and the short horizontal connecting tracks.
2. I batch renamed the photos to 0001 through 5443.
3. Used Python to convert my telemetry files into a text file with only GPS, altitude, and waypoint flags. I downloaded the Ecosynth Aerial Pipeline, ran start_windows.bat, clicked on Point Cloud Pre-Processing, clicked on telemetry conversion sript, and ran my log files.
4. I then manually trimmed my text files down to only the start and end of the tracks. I did this using the waypoint flags and by double checking the GPS coordinates in Google Earth to make sure they were right on top of the places where my tracks start and stop. I then deleted the waypoint flags leaving only GPS coordinates and altitudes. It looked like this:
39.2553516 -76.7060103 100
39.2553536 -76.7060059 99.97
39.2553558 -76.706002 99.96
39.2553587 -76.7059985 99.97
39.2553619 -76.7059957 99.99
5. Next I ran another python script to assign GPS coordinates to each picture. Basically I took a folder for each flight, put the pictures in their corresponding folders according to flight, put the appropriate text file for each flight in the folder, and ran the script. Please note that I believe this file only works for our 2FPS Canon ELPH520 setup. It looked like this:
# <label> <x> <y> <z>
IMG_0001.JPG 39.2553536 -76.7060059 99.97
IMG_0002.JPG 39.2553587 -76.7059985 99.97
IMG_0003.JPG 39.2553653 -76.7059932 99.99
IMG_0004.JPG 39.2553733 -76.7059892 100.01
IMG_0005.JPG 39.2553829 -76.7059861 100.02
6. I then merged the resulting three text files into one large file for Photoscan ground control, and moved all the photos back into one large folder together.
7. I added my photos to Photoscan, and used the ground control screen to import my GPS coordintes and heights. I left the accuracy at 10m.
8. I ran Photoscan! Everything after this is just simple use of Photoscan according to the manual.
9. After the point cloud was procesed, I ran both a height map and an arbitrary geometry (true 3D) mesh model. Both models were very large, about 16 GB each. I made several decimated and textured models for export.
10. I exported directly from Photoscan to Sketchfab. I also made some .ply files, as well as orthophotos.
The Goods:
Here's a small version of the orthophoto. The full resolution version is 0.03 m resolution, meaning each pixel represents 3 centimeters. I've never been super excited about orthophotos since I work mainly in 3D, but this was easy to make so I figured why not include it.
Download the Full Resolution Orthophoto as Shown Above.
This is the sparse point cloud from Photoscan. Point clouds are our bread and butter in our lab. I think this one turned out rather nicely.
Download the Sparse Point Cloud (.ply) as Shown Above.
Download the Sparse Point Cloud (.las) as Shown Above.
Once you zoom in, you can see why it's called a sparse point cloud. This is a the same cloud as the previous image, but cropped down to just the library and zoomed in. Obviously, roofs and lawns get a lot more points than the sides of buildings.
Here's that same view of the library, but with the dense point cloud. A lot nicer! I had to do only the library on dense, because dense cloud processing time is prohibitively long. But I feel it needs mentioning, the entire campus could be processed to this level of detail given enough patience and a supercomputer. Notice how the points on the tan roofs and the grass are so dense as to look like a solid, but the white roofs and the sides of the building are not as dense.
Download the Dense Point Cloud (.ply) as Shown Above.
Download the Dense Point Cloud (.las) as Shown Above.
Now it's time for some 3D meshes! Obviously, the raw mesh product is a prohibitively large file. So I performed decimations and cropped to smaller areas. I have Sketchfab pages and .ply files!
This is the full campus! It had to be decimated pretty heavily to fit onto Sketchfab.
For whatever reason, the Sketchfab models get very wiggly on some of these models. I recommend downloading the .ply for seeing the best texture.
Sketchfab for this one is very wiggly, I recommend the .ply.
Another nice one. These apartments were easy work for Photoscan.
Sorry the colors are so dim in these Meshlab screenshots, I am very new at Meshlab.
If you zoom in on the parkin garage, you will see that a couple of cars look transparent and ghostly. This is because the car either left or pulled in between the copter's multiple passes.
The following series of images shows each progressively more complex representation of the 3D model available from Photoscan. They're from my most complex model, screenshotted straight out of Photoscan. This model is so big that I cannot open it with any external programs, I have to decimate it.
This is just the sparse point cloud, the most basic representation. Notice some surfaces have no or few points, like the sidewalks and some roofs. This is because plain white objects have few identifiable features.
This is the wire mesh representation. I had to zoom in to make the individual polygons visible.
Now we have the solid mesh. It is like the wire mesh, but with each polygon filled in. This representation is good for examining the shape of your model without visual clues in the texture changing how the shapes appear.
Next is the shaded solid! Photoscan assigns each polygon some diffuse colors. Since the polygons in this model are so small, this gives a decent representation.
The final textured model. This is as realistic looking as it gets, for this scan.
And finally, I'd like to show some screenshots from the high quality model:
All in all, this project was a cool experience and I'm glad the T3 contest prompted me to do it. I definitely learned a few things:
Credit goes to the Ecosynth lab at UMBC (of which I am an intern) for use of their equipment to do this scan. Check us out at Ecosynth.org. Credit also goes to Jonathan Dandois (also of Ecosynth) for helping me with georeferencing the photos.
It's been a couple of weeks, and now we have a new version on APM Planner 2.0 to download. If you are not following the the daily releases from http://firmware.diydrones.com/Tools/APMPlanner/daily/ which have the most up to date fixes as reported by our users. Please download the new version from here http://ardupilot.com/downloads/?category=35
Please report issues here http://ardupilot.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=82 and here https://github.com/diydrones/apm_planner/issues
Thanks, Bill
I just managed to get APM Planner RC2 running on my Raspberry Pi. I have not tested connecting to an APM yet but clicking around in the interface is much more responsive than i ever thought it would be.
Here are a brief instruction:
Install the required packages:
sudo apt-get install phonon libqt4-dev \ libphonon-dev libphonon4 phonon-backend-gstreamer \ qtcreator libsdl1.2-dev libflite1 flite1-dev build-essential \ libopenscenegraph-dev libssl-dev
Clone the repository in your workspace:
cd ~/workspace git clone https://github.com/diydrones/apm_planner
Build APM Planner:
cd ~/workspace/apm_planner qmake-qt4 qgroundcontrol.pro
make
Run APM Planner:
./release/apmplanner2
Last month I detailed my plans and preparation for an attempt at a 100km flight in a blog here.
Well yesterday the weather was ideal and my preparations (nearly) complete so I went for it and achieved a flight distance of 126km in a time of 2 hr 46 min 40 sec.
I can't attach my log file here because it's too big. It's 15MB and there's a 7MB limit. Any ideas how I can share it?
I exported the KMZ (2014-01-28%2006-32-40.tlog.kmz) to Google Earth and generated the following images showing the flight path, and the altitude/speed trace with some of the vital statistics.
[Click image to enlarge]
The airframe is a Bormatec Maja with 2.2m wingspan. It’s not the most aerodynamic airframe, but its advantage is its payload capacity which allowed me to carry 21600 mAh 6P4S Li Ion batteries with ease.
I stripped out absolutely everything I didn't need including the obvious things like FPV cables in the wings, and thanks to some advice on my previous blog I also removed a few things I wouldn't have thought of such as the RC receiver case and airspeed sensor.
The advice I had from other DIYDrones users was invaluable but the biggest factor in improving the performance was the testing I did. For each variable I wanted to examine I would fly multiple laps at different settings then analyse the log files to find the best performing setup. I give more details on that in the original blog.
For the actual record attempt there were a few things I’d never done before. One was flying without the airspeed sensor (I had flown with it switched off, but never with it physically removed) and the other was the 4 cell batteries. Probably both those things were the cause of the trouble I had getting the plane to fly at the 13m/s (47km/hr) I wanted. Initially it was much too fast. Over the period of a few laps I adjusted the cruise throttle percentage, the cruise speed and the min and max speeds to much lower than I really wanted which bought the speed down (and pitch up) to where I wanted it.
Key Stats
• Distance: 126km (according to Google Earth)
• Duration: 2hr 46min 40 sec
• Airframe: Bormatec Maja
• Wingspan: 2.2 m
• AUW: 3.25 kg
• Battery capacity: 21,600 mAh
• Average Speed: 45.6 km/hr
• Top speed: 68.3 km/hr
• Minimum speed 40.5 km/hr
• Duration: 2hr 46min 40 sec
• Barometer creep: -6m
From New Scientist:
A drone with legs can perch just like a bird – or land and walk on flat surfaces. Bhargav Gajjar of Vishwa Robotics in Brighton, Massachusetts, designed the legs as an add-on for small US air force drones.
Small drones generally lack landing gear. Many rely on a controlled crash-landing, a somewhat crude approach compared with the elegant precision landing of a perching bird. Gajjar studied dozens of bird species and recorded their landings using a high-speed camera. His drone’s legs are based on those of the American kestrel.
The drone perches in an upright position with a powerful gripping action from an electric motor. Its claws are extremely sharp so that its grip is difficult to break.
A remote computer uses footage from a camera fitted to the drone to control flight and get the drone into the correct position for landing. Just like a real bird, the drone has to brake sharply just above its landing site and perform a controlled stall in order to touch down. Birds’ legs also act as shock absorbers, and the mechanical version mimics this.
Gajjar’s perching legs can waddle short distances, so the drone can explore indoor spaces.
(via sUASNews)
An interesting day at the field today...
Took off after preflgiht checks, and eveything was looking ok. Hovering at around 40%, looked slightly twitchy - probably because the PID's were at default, and I was about to Autotune them into oblivion, so no biggie. Gave it a bit of gas to test motor aligment, and woooahhh - massive lurch to motor 2. Caught it, but now motor 2 was permanently dragging the quad to the left left and backwards. Got it on the ground eventually thank god.
Checked it over, and...nothing. Could find nothing wrong. No play in motor 2, no vibes or grinding - it was running smooth. MP was saying "Autotune activated"...which is strange, because it wasn't configured. Ok, so an APM freakout? Should be fine after I reboot it. And...
It was like someone had gone bezerk with the PID's. Landed immediately. Back to MP...no problems. Everything looked ok!
Tune down the PID's from 0.09 to 0.07, and rebooted. That helped...but it was still oscillating. So I basically had to call it - I wasn't going to get a good flight today.
On the bench, I found it!
When removing motor 2's prop...I noticed a bit of play. I wiggled it...nothing. I *lifted* it...hey presto! Got a full 2mm of lift! Then it clicked...these were pancake motors (Tmotor 3508-29's)...a nice wide diameter, but a very low stack height. Which means any change in the magnet-coil overlap would be immediately noticable. And this is where I think the problems were for me - when you gas it, the thrust tried to pull the bell from the motor...and if it succeeds, the power drops off dramatically! The play had come in because the two tiny allen bolts clamping the bell to the shaft had come loose, and were bouncing up and down in the 'flat' of the shaft...good job the flat was there - it would have completely flown off otherwise! 2-3 turns with an allen key, and bingo - tight as a drum again, but I'd lost my flight window to the weather (5-7mm hailstones!!!)
Less of an issue for more vertical motors, but definitely a problem for pancakes.
So there you go. Top Tip for today - if you run pancakes make sure your "motor play" check includes the Z axis!
PS - yeah, I know my gimbal ain't right...it's a martinez on defaults and need power, P and I. Will be fixed next time.
Does this look familiar?
Go Discover FPV Plane, and in Australia store!! $150 bucks
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The Go Discover was designed from the start to be a great FPV platform with a massive center bay, straight forward layout and superb, predictable, yet sporty, flight characteristics.
What makes the Go Discover stand out is the integrated pan and tilt system in the nose, giving an un-obstructed bird’s eye view of the world below. The pan and tilt system uses 2 gear driven engagements for a smooth solid camera platform. The pan and tilt system was designed to perfectly house a GoPro 1, 2, 3 or 3+ as well as any other board or cube FPV camera with an easy swappable back mounting plate, all housed behind a clear acrylic dome. The front dome provides a great view, while protecting your FPV gear.
Chris Anderson, Chance Roth, and Gus Calderon discuss the emerging market for unmanned aircraft on MSNBC's show titled "Your Business." Here is a link to the story:
Local quad "expert" asserts that there will be a series of major incidents worldwide using "drones" in the next 6 months.
CAA (NZ) says drone technology has outpaced its regulations and it needs to move with haste to get new rules in place to keep our air space both safe and under some sort of control.
Let's hope this feature is fully implemented in DroidPlanner 2.0 as there are many reasons and ways to use this feature for aerial mapping and photography.
In this iconic episode, the two co-hosts of the sUAS Podcast discuss the use of small unmanned aircraft for search and rescue operations. Gene Robinson, owner of RP Search Services, discusses the technological advancements in the field and also the impact of being featured in the documentary “Civilian Drones – Search & Rescue.” Host of Drone TV, Patrick Egan, asks poignant questions to both Gene and his wife Angelique. This episode was sponsored by Robota:
Hey Diy Drones! I did a Newbies Guide to DiyDrones.com on Jan 25th, 2013 and when I watched the video it was really awesome to see the change visually over the course of the 2013 year. This blog will be really helpful to those who are new around here and have questions about how things work on Diy Drones. I'm opening up my Diy Drones Inbox for any new members who find this blog helpful and have questions about where to find things or anything else of the sort. I am in no way, shape, or form affiliated with Diy Drones I just want to put my 3+ years as a Diy Drones Members to good use to help "show the ropes" to the newer crowd here! Above is a Video I just created which is a very general guide to how the site operates and such. Below that video is the video from almost a year ago.
Take it Easy Diy Drones,
Joshua Johnson From CADDrones.com
Good day everyone,
A modern drone or flying robot tends to have quite a number of different hardware units onboard - Autopilot, Gimbal, GPS, ESC, OSD, PDB, RC just to name a few. As there is no common method to interconnect that variety of devices, and for sure each hardware unit tends to implement its very own interface, obvious difficulties arise:
- Implementing support for new peripherals is hard (e.g. consider PX4Flow driver for APM; 3DR GPS; MinimOSD).
- Autopilots need to accommodate variety of physical interfaces for different peripherals - this imposes some penalties on the device size, cost and weight (e.g. Pixhawk and its so called "connector farm").
- MOST of currently used interfaces are simply not designed to be reliable nor scalable, thus moving towards more reliable systems while sticking to the current onboard communication methods is absolutely impossible (e.g. RC PWM - pet peeve of mine, absolutely worst case; or ubiquitous UART).
Properly designed standard for hardware interconnection in UAV systems may encourage different manufacturers to produce compatible hardware and software, this is why I consider it important to offer such a standard for community. Previously I took some steps trying to rectify the current state of affairs with the hardware compatibility: first, I implemented the CANaerospace protocol support in portable C library - libcanaerospace: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/open-source-canaerospace-library-for-uav (BTW this article covers the CAN bus features in general, those who are unfamiliar with CAN may be interested to read); second, with cooperation with Lorenz Meier, there was proposed a convention for connector compatibility: http://www.diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/can-bus-conventions-for-small-uav.
However, CANaerospace is apparently not a silver bullet, here's why:
- CANaerospace has more than 50% of payload overhead which makes it unfit for high speed data streams that are so common for UAV (especially for light machines where the controlled system requires high update rates and low latency).
- CANaerospace does not provide an easy way to pass multiple values in one bunch, which is also very common task in the UAV field.
- CANaerospace does not provide adequate means for some extremely common higher-level tasks, such as node configuration handling, firmware update, time synchronization, etc.
Thus, there seem to be a need for some protocol that could be used as a backbone network on UAV and flying robots, and that could address the issues listed above. So meet the UAVCAN protocol specification draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IgOZ2proS0Bwx3_nc8u7CM81ldHcxWzlgMVjNfW5Has/pub
UAVCAN core design goals:
- Provide a suitable protocol standard for UAV hardware manufacturers.
- Support redundant physical interfaces and redundant nodes for highly reliable systems.
- Address the issues inherent to CANaerospace, as listed above.
- Make it easy to implement and easy to use in deeply embedded systems with limited computational capabilities (i.e. ensure small memory footprint, low computational complexity).
- Explicitly define support for some common tasks (node configuration handling, firmware update, time synchronization, etc).
All of this is described in-depth in the RFC linked above. I'd like to ask the community for comments on this standard, especially regarding the standard data type definitions (see the corresponding chapter), the "std/equipment/" part. It is important to make sure that the standard types are extensive enough to cover most possible use cases for the majority of UAV applications. Also I'd like to make sure that the RFC language is comprehensive enough so that other engineers can get at least general idea of how to implement it, and absolutely clear understanding of how to use it.
As a closing remark I'd like to add that the situation with UAV hardware is changing: the next revision of Pixhawk is going to get the full support for UAVCAN, as well as PX4ESC is; also there are some other compatible hardware to be announced pretty soon.
Best regards,
Pavel Kirienko.
P.S. This is a cross-post from drones-discuss: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/drones-discuss/DMjfnaWViUw; please leave your comments there.
With the above video above, Hobbyking announced last Saturday that they are getting into 3D printing. Since last Tuesday the products are gradually added to their site.
First item that was added was the 3D Printer Hot Plate MK2B Dual Power RepRap Mendel and RAMPS Compatible. The PCB Heatbed MK2 is a dual power “hot plate” for 3d printers, helping in adhesion and to prevent “curling” as the plastic cools down.
Next item that was added the the site is the 2A Micro-Stepping Stepper Motor Driver A4988 ( Pololu Compatible ). The A4988 micro-stepping stepper motor driver is a Pololu format compatible driver, ideal for Shield and breadboard compatibility. A little down the post I your will find 2 versions the PCB that these drivers need to be added to.
The 3D Printer RAMPS 1.4 Control Board Arduino Mega Shield is one of the 2 available control boards that can be used as the heart of your 3D printer. This PCB allows for 5 stepper motor driver boards as shown above. The bottom pins allow you to place this board on your Arduino Mega.
The product page has links to more details for this board.
The 3D Printer-Ultimaker V1.5.7 PCB Main Control Board DIY ( RAMPS compatibilitable) is your other option as a controller for a 3D printer. The Ultimaker 1.5.7 board is an Arduino Mega shield, geared for the DIY 3D printer market and has some great features not found on the RAMPS compatible boards such as higher input voltage ability and power connectivity options.
More details on how to use this board at: http://reprap.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Ultimaker%27s_v1.5.7_PCB
The 3D Printer RepRap Smart Controller ( Ramps LCD Control ) r is a graphical user interface to control your 3D printer without the need of a direct computer connection. It can be plugged into the 3D printer control board mentioned above.
See also the big brother with a better interface of this LCD below.
The bigger 3D Printer Full Graphic Smart Controller ( RAMPS RepRap ) has the same functionality as the LCD mentioned above.
In the next days we will have to find out if Hobbyking comes up with more products related to 3D printing. Personally I will wait a couple of day more before I start ordering. I understood from the video that they are not going to sell frames, but there are more items we are going to need to complete a printer. Extruders, fillament, adapters to power the electronics of your printer and more.
If any products are added to the site, I will mention them in the comments below. If you have any suggestions for frames and other products that can be used with these items, then please write the information in the comments.
Our Pixhawk autopilot has just arrived, so we raise a pint or two to 3DR.
The Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator (LOHAN) team this morning welcomed aboard a handsome young autopilot for our Vulture 2 spaceplane - the hot-off-the-press 3D Robotics Pixhawk.
3DR kindly offered to donate a couple of Pixhawks to the cause, after ArduPilot fixed-wing lead developer Andrew Tridgell suggested we'd benefit from the improved data-logging capabilities over our existing ArduPilot Mega (APM) 2.6.
