Blogs

Via Hackaday:

Where most GPS receivers only look at the data coming from the GPS satellites orbiting overhead, the Piksi uses another technique, real-time kinematics (RTK), to determine the receiver’s location with exacting precision. The basic idea behind RTK is to look at the carrier frequency of the GPS signals at 1575.42 MHz. This frequency has a wavelength of 19 cm, compared to the alternating 1s and 0s of the that are transmitted at around 1 MHz, or about 300 meters between each bit. While centimeter-level precision isn’t possible with only one receiver, two of these Piksi boards – one base station and one on a vehicle, connected via radio link – can make for a very exacting high-accuracy GPS receiver.

After being in service since 2009, its time to evolve MAVLink and add encryption, starting with a Request for Comments (RFC). The initial MAVLink protocol had only the scope to serve for the PIXHAWK student project at ETH, and hence security was left for the link layer. Obviously the adoption is far beyond the scope of the original design by now. After Arthur's great job on the MAVLink Wikipedia article there is no further need to explain what MAVLink exactly is, but there is one important insight: The adoption and use exceeds by far the original design space, in particular because typical links do not provide authentication and encryption, which was originally assumed.

With more and wider adoption, the exposure of the protocol increases, and so the next revision (which will be backwards compatible if by any means technically possible) will add support for authentication and encryption.

The purpose of this post is to ask for comments on the very early draft of a request for comments call posted today. We're interested in technical contributions (specs, code, testing) but also in general considerations. At this point it is too early to discuss which hardware it can be run on, it will certainly run fine on PX4-generation systems (a first test of the crypto primitives is here), and there is currently no reason to assume that other existing aircraft setups can't be upgraded in a modular fashion as well. Please respond directly for the mailing list thread here for comments on the RFC, for general comments on this post feel free to use the comment box.

Dear Friends, Some time ago I've introduced on diydrones.com my carbon profiled gimbal and now the product is ready for preorder. I tried to design something different than cutted carbon plate. After design I've made a few prototypes and tests. The gimbal working properly, the net weight is 700g without camera. The max payload 3000g.

About the technology; it is vacuum formed 3K carbon fiber certified for aerospace industry, including the resin. After 2 Months tests the gimbal was modified and now is ready for wider usage.

The other movie can show how my gimbals works.

It is old news to some folk but the 2013 Instructables Drone contest ended on July 15 and the winners were:

(Note: Author names are Instructable member names. Several are DIYD members with different names on this site.)

Grand Prize Winner (Prize: RTF 3DR Quadcopter Kit and an Instructables prize pack including a robot t-shirt.)

DIY (Drone It Yourself) Kit v1.0 by javl

First Prize Winners (Prize: 3DR APM Autopilot Kit with GPS, Telemetry and Voltage Sensor and an Instructables prize pack including a robot t-shirt.)

Build Your Own Eco-Quad Copter from Reused and Recycled Materials by KT-AZ

Cheap, Sturdy, 1-Hour Quadcopter by marhar

A Wide-Body Quadrotor - designs and ideas to build your own. by vtxstar

Second Prize Winners (Prize: 3DR T-shirt and an Instructables prize pack including a robot t-shirt.)

Laser Cut MultiWii based quadcopter by dylanfm

Building Quadcopters, Drones and Uav's- A explanation and easy build of a basic Quad. by eben89

Solar Plane by jeffmazter406

3D Printed Ornithopter - Micro UAV Drone by Mizchief100

Brushless Gimbal for Aerial Photography Drones by oesti

Runner Up Winners (Prize: Instructable prize pack including a robot t-shirt.)

iPod AR. Drone flying spy camera at Brookstone and Apple smart phone DRONE by Parrot by GREENPOWERSCIENCE

How to build a Multirotor by Jared_Reabow

Black Eagle aerial mapping UAV by Justinvent

3D Printed Sumo Robot with High Traction Wheels by kmmarlow

Waterproof, Crashproof, Homemade Drone Airframe by mcornblatt

Our Drone by Michael_Bell

MAKE YOUR OWN TRICOPTER! by pawanvs99

Autonomous drone that you already have in your pocket! by prubeš

Canon Remote Shutter for R/C by squiggy2

At total of 45 entries were made in the contest and a wide variety of subjects were covered.

The Instructables Drone Contest page is HERE.

The original DIYD blog post announcing the contest is HERE.

Yours truly was a First Prize winner and I appreciate the new APM 2.6 setup. It will be employed in a DJI F550 Hex build (one of several builds on the bench at this time.) Additional thanks to go John Githens, DIYD member and webmaster of DroneSpeak.com, for his suggestions and editing efforts on my entry.

Thanks also to Instructables for the prize package (1 year Pro membership). If you haven't visited Instructables before, you are missing out on A LOT of amazing community sourced DIYD projects. Almost everything you can imagine is there. I have been a member since 2008 and it simply took this contest to get me off the lurker list and active. You should check it out.

In my opinion, Mark Harrison should get a Community Award for the number of views of his Instructable.

Mark is a continuous supporter of RC activity and had already won in a previous Instructable, the Launch It! contest, with his 1-hour quad project.

Many thanks again to 3DR and DIY Drones for sponsoring the contest.

-=Doug

Hi,

A week ago a new website was launched - www.RCMatch.com the website is a price comparison system for finding and comparing RC products - and ONLY RC products.

I found it in great use when shopping for stuff, for example, I looked for Propellers :) It displays the whole variety of it! You can even filter by size, brand and sort by price. look here:

If you'll look for kits and frames you can find there everything!

But the killer feature is the Virtual Cart you can create (after you register, click "Join" above) a virtual cart of items and then compare it between the different store :) Priceless!

I hope you can use it the same as I till today when I looked for a product I searched for it in my "usual" 2-3 store, now my search is much wider.

Enjoy

Maayan Dreamer

Just a quick post to highlight Michael Oborne's great work evolving the Mission Planner, which seems to get better with every day! Above you can see the new frame selection screen, which gives a sense of the dizzying variety of configurations that APM:Copter supports. 

There's a new desktop icon, too

If you hit CTRL-W, you can see an alpha preview of what will be the new Setup Wizard:

And if you're feeling really brave, play around the with the alpha Swarming interface (CTRL-F). We'll be posting a tutorial on multi-UAV swarming in a few weeks, so I recommend you wait for that before trying it. But it's just a glimpse of how powerful the Mission Planner is. Bravo Michael!

First, I used combinations of switches to select the mode of my APM. But IMHO, there is hardly anything more counter-intuitive and if things hit the fan, you can be sure to switch to the wrong mode out of pure hectic.

Next, I replaced a pot of my transmitter with a 6-position switch and variable resistors. That is already better, but to get to one mode, you likely have to switch through other modes. Also, without any markings, again, not very intuitive and it's impossible to see at one glance which mode you are in.

Finally, I hacked together a small board with 6 pushbuttons, 6 LEDs and an Arduino Pro Mini. The Arduino creates an 8-channel PPM stream of which channel 1 contains the data for the mode. The whole thing connects to the trainer port of my 9x. Additionally, I steal 5V from the display output of my FrSky module but theoretically, the Arduino could also be powered by the 3S transmitter LiPo. The program is pretty easy. Check the buttons and set the respective PPM value. The LEDs are not set by the buttons but by the actual value of PPM1 - just to be safe, in case e.g. the Arduino resets or something.

Here's the schematic:

I'll attach design files for the PCB and the source code in the comments then.

Dear Friends,

this is the first images from VR Lab . In these pictures you can see our entry level frame VR CopterX4-8

The frame make using good materials as Carbon Fiber and Ergal .

The frame configuration was an idea of Flavio Taborelli , that inside Virtualrobotix.IT is the CTO of mechanical department. This frame doing 2000 hours of flight without chrash so we decide to use this approach for develop our affordable frame.

On a Ready to Fly revision of Drone you can put :

• VR Brain 4.5 as flight controller .
• VR IMU Gold.
• UBlox GPS
• 4 or 8 x 30 Amp SimonK VR ESC
• 4 or 8 T-Motors
• 4 or 8 Propellers until 13''
• 3DR telemetry link
• Battery until 10'000 mah 3S-6S

FPV version

• Video TX for FPV
• Micro Camera for FPV with servo motor for control the pitch of view.

Observer revision .

• Full VR Gimbal 3Axis
• Battery 2-3S for gimbal.

The production of this frame will be start at the end of August .

The main advantage is that is a fully customizable and available as DIY KIT on in RTF configuration. This kind of frame is very good for hacking is possible to customize the cover with your color or layout :

or fully customize your frame this is an example :

All the frame is developed inside VR Lab using advanced mechanical 3D Cad.

In the next week will be some updates about the status of the project.

If you need more info or have suggestions we are happy to disucss with you about our last VR Copter

original blog post : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/vr-lab-present-last-drone-developed-in-virtualrobotix

if you like our project Support our work and join us on our facebook community :)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/VirtualRobotix-wwwvirtualrobotixcom/149125448465971

Best

Roberto

Vegetation Monitoring UAV - Greenland from jtk on Vimeo.

(Re-post from Jeff Kerby @ http://vimeo.com/69579388)

To better understand arctic herbivore foraging ecology, we need information about the timing of plant growth (i.e. plant phenology) at high resolution over several square kilometers.

The solution: A vegetation monitoring UAV!

Still in the testing phases here, but we’re using a small point-and-shoot camera (Canon S100 or Sony NEX 5n) mounted on this lightweight aerial platform (GoPro used for video footage) to map changing patterns of vegetation growth throughout the season. Using the high-resolution maps made by stitching these photos together, we are able to study patterns of vegetation development at spatial scales that even the most sophisticated satellites cannot match. This approach avoids the high costs and logistical constraints of traditional airplane-based mapping.

The logistics of supporting this out on the Greenland tundra, however, are quite challenging! Should have brought a few more spare parts with me.

Footage taken by Jeff Kerby and Christian John.
UAV construction and support from Lian Pin Koh at ConservationDrones.org

Interesting things I saw at the EAA Airventure event in Wisconsin this week.

Here is former GMA host David Hartman interviewing astronauts Chris Hadfield, Chris Ferguson, Charles Precourt, and Charles Duke.

Hadfield talked about space walking and his youtube video.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo    The guitar is still up there and has made 65,000 orbits so far.

Ferguson talked about building the ISS and flying the last ever shuttle mission. He now works on the Boeing space systems program.

Precourt also flew the shuttle and talked about the lull between space systems like Apollo to Shuttle, etc. He is now building "Apollo on steroids" at ATK.

Charles Duke was capcom for Apollo 11 and said "you got a bunch of guys about to turn blue down here". He also walked on the moon on Apollo 16.

John Nicol gave a talk about Makerplane, the open source manned airplane project. He said they are getting close to freezing the design and they just started an Indiegogo campaign. One of their goals is to build a $400.00 glass cockpit. He also mentioned talking to our own Chris Anderson about open source aviation.

http://makerplane.org/

For anybody that ever wanted to ride on their Slow Stick plane, now you can!  GreenWing International (formerly Yuneec I think) makes an ultralight electric plane that looks like a big Slow Stick.  It has a 10 meter wingspan, a 24 Kw motor that looks like one of my brushless motors only bigger, and a 13 Kwh lithium battery.   http://greenwing.aero/?page_id=2307

The TerraFugia drove and flew at Airventure.  I was impressed by the car/plane (plar? clane?) and the price ($279,000 hope it comes down)  I thought it performed well, but I overheard a lot of comments like it will not be a good car or a good plane (luddite naysayers), I still want one in my garage.    http://www.terrafugia.com/

And I saw Yves Rossy, The Jet Man.  Well, sort of saw him as he was a speck at 5000 feet, where he did all of his flying.

And Asimo the robot gave a demo of walking, talking, and even running a little bit, which was cool but, I wanted to take it apart and see the inside.  Hmm.  

(My apologies if this topic has already been posted. I did not find mention when searching the DIYD site.)

A panel discussion in May was one of the most informative videos I have seen recently about both opportunities and constraints for the evolving civilian UVS industry.

Click here to see the video.

If you are in a hurry, you can skip the intros by starting at 01:30 to hear Cummings for 14 minutes.

But there is much more in the rest of the video. For example, Cummings' views on the topic of "autonomy", starting at 22:55.

Q&A section with the audience starts at 37:20. 

Video ends at 46:25.

An article in Popular Mechanics on the rise of UAV programs in American universities. 

Excerpt:

A growing number of American universities now offer classes on operating an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), enrolling students who hope to one day find work for employers such as defense contractors. But will the lucrative jobs be there when they graduate? As U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan winds down and contractor salaries shrink, the answer to that question depends on the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). If the FAA ultimately integrates UAVs into the national airspace, the Class of 2015 will find ample new opportunities as unmanned aircraft enter new fields. 

Unmanned Aircraft 101

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., has been teaching America's young aviators how to fly since 1926. Two years ago the school added a new major in unmanned aircraft system sciences, and the response has been enthusiastic. "We already have 110 students in the program," says Nickolas "Dan" Macchiarella, chair of the aeronautical science department. "And we know that our fall enrollment will be even bigger." 

Embry-Riddle's unmanned aircraft major offers two tracks, one pilot and the other non-pilot (it teaches skills such as sensor operators and UAV ground support crew). Both come with a heavy load of prerequisites in aeronautics and engineering. Pilots generally train with small civilian drones. However, in the capstone course, "AS 473: UAS Flight Simulation," students use simulators to practice with medium-altitude long-endurance vehicles: the same size class of UAV as the Predator or the Israeli Heron TP. "They conduct operations like the kind that would be used for homeland security and public safety," Macchiarella says. 

Given the sensitive nature of the program, the State Department's regulations mandate that all unmanned aircraft system sciences students be U.S. citizens. But otherwise, they are just regular college kids. 

And a number of "regular" colleges are now teaching UAV operation, too. These include the University of North Dakota, Northwestern Michigan College (which owns a small quadcopter and a Penguin B fixed-wing system), Kansas State University-Salina, and Liberty University (which offers courses like "GOVT 383: History and Nature of Intelligence Tools"). The State of Nevada is coordinating all of its UAV education through the brand-new Nevada Autonomous Systems Institute. 

Here's the latest installment of the "Drone U" podcast from the New America Foundation. I've listened to the whole thing (15 mins), and I frankly I don't think members of this site will learn much they don't already know (the head of AUVSI explains the basics of drones, regs and the difference between an UAV and a UAS), but it's notable that they're doing this series on Slate. 

Oh, and maybe "killer app" is not the best phrase for them to be using ;-)

Given the positive response to this recent blog post, we arranged with CafePress to offer a few ZOV-labeled products. Use this link to get to the storefront. At the moment when this blog post was submitted, the mugs were in stock, but not the license plate frames. CafePress expects more in stock soon. Enjoy!

- JohnG at dronespeak.com

Upcoming Documentary Civilian Drones highlights The Human Toll while the U.S. NAS Integration Effort Stagnates.

The documentary produced by MahaPix Studios is sure to raise eyebrows as it exposes the viewer to the lifesaving potential of small unmanned systems. Beyond the hypothetical, the film reveals the incredible potential of unmanned technology when placed in the hands of dedicated individuals with passion and experience. Transcending the business plan, the film delves into an industry that has been crippled and waylaid by what can only be labeled a bureaucratic travesty.

(Patricks words not mine)

all Aluminum Frame
was telling my brother if this was a good idea.... made from an old External HDD case. nearly 2KG AUW

the HDD case was from my cousin...

one 950KV from emax and three 850kv from Jdrone in the pic is a 9x45 prop but will upgrade it to 10x45prop due to under power.
will post the vid as soon its maiden

and if your talking about balance its just 100kv difference & the flight controller took care of that.

This isn't a drone, but wow: FPV cars, with remote human operators!

From Gizmag:

Researchers at Germany’s Technische Universität München (TUM) are...developing remote-control cars that could travel along city streets with no one in them at all, their operator located somewhere far away.

First of all, what would be the point of a passenger-less car? As a couple of examples, the scientists suggest that the technology could be used to deliver rental cars or vehicles used in car-sharing programs to members’ homes, plus it could be applied to city-center parking services – you just get out when you reach your downtown destination, and your car proceeds to head off to the parking garage on its own.

So far, the TUM team has equipped a prototype Visio.M electric car with six video cameras, five of which are mounted on the back of the rearview mirror (facing forwards or to the sides) and one of which is looking out the rear window. Together, they provide a 360-degree view of the car’s surroundings.

A live feed from the cameras is transmitted to a remote operator station that resembles a driving simulator, via LTE wireless communication. At that station, three monitors display the front and side views from the car, while a fourth displays the view out the back. Microphones aboard the car provide live Dolby 5.1 audio, while force feedback mechanisms in the station’s steering wheel and brake pedal mirror the forces encountered by the car itself.

Using all this technology, a human operator simply sits at the station and remotely drives the car as if they’re playing a video game. If there’s a break in communications, the car automatically brakes and sits in place until they’re resumed.

The scientists claim that the system isn’t very expensive, and that the LTE networks in many cities are already sufficient to transmit all the required video, audio and control data in real time. They add that slower UMTS networks could also work, as they would produce a transmission lag of less than half a second – which admittedly could still make a huge difference in accident avoidance.

Although issues such as legal liability still need to be addressed, the researchers expect the technology to be in use within five to ten years.

Our all-star interns have been brewing up some cool devices this summer at 3DR. Three words: Oculus Rift FPV.  

We have the Oculus communicating through the Mission Planner as a joystick input, driving the pan/tilt servo gimbal on our Skyhunter fixed-wing aircraft. Video is piped to the ground via standard 5.8GHz TX/RX gear, with the 3DR OSD kit in line. The end result is one for which you should stay firmly seated; even without the video stretched all the way to the periphery, the experience is incredibly immersive.

Our current setup is based on monocular video, but stayed tuned for more from Project Warg, including stereoscopic video, new airframes, and closed-loop aircraft control with the Oculus!