Blogs

Earlier this week I was able to fulfill one of my long-time goals of making an FPV assent of one of Colorado's 14,000 foot peaks (14ers in local lingo). I flew my Deep Reaper XL flying wing to the top of the 14,065 foot Mount Bierstadt.

Flying at high altitudes can be a challenge. My launch point was at the top of Guanella Pass, which is around 11,600 feet elevation. This was the first time I've tried flying at that altitude, and I wasn't even completely sure my plane would be able to launch. But because I have around a pound more thrust than the plane's weight and there was a stiff wind to toss it into, the plane launched just fine.

The weather wasn't terribly favorable, and was constantly threatening rain. On my second flight I ended up getting myself and all my equipment drenched in a sudden downpour. The air was very turbulent in the lee of the mountain and my plane got tossed around quite a bit. I also had a very bad video signal near the peak--I suspect because of multipathing off the mountain combined with interference from the thunderstorms in the area.

Despite all the challenges, the flight was a success and the video turned out beautifully. I'm hoping to do a lot more high altitude flying in the Colorado mountains before the end of the summer.

Filmed with a Contour Roam2 HD camera. Edited in Sony Vegas Pro 12.

Gear:
Crash Test Hobbies Deep Reaper XL flying wing
1250kv Turnigy SK3 motor, 10x6 APC propeller
2x 4000 mah 4S 20C Zippy batteries
800mw 1.3ghz VTX w/ Mad Mushroom antenna on the plane; crosshair antenna on the ground

The new 3D Robotics Tijuana factory is up and running! Above is an overview from the inventory area (drop ceilings are still being finished)

The big new Manncorp four-head pick-and-place machine (our third!)

QA and hand-finishing

The PCB washing station

The PCB examination microscope station

In use!

Inventory area

Power Module PCBs 

Finished power modules

Outside the CNC clean room

Ok, after shooting some video in "third person", I've realised that to get good video (within my budget), I need to go FPV. To that end, the first of the purchases arrived today...a Bluebeam 5.8ghz set and a minumOSD. Fatshark Atitude kit is in the post.

The video Tx will be mounted in the port pylon (nose is to bottom in this pic). The onboard 3DR telem radio has been removed, and the minumOSD located under the output servo leads:

The video itself will be a VGA feed from the GoPro. The gimbal has since been re-stabilised to accommodate the weight of the cable. It's not a pretty picture with the cable hanging loose, but the gimbal glitches at the slightest snag of the wires otherwise.

Already planned my test flights. The advantage of living in Switzerland is that there are often easy spots overlooking uninhabited farmland valleys. This makes LOS vast...a good test of range, and allows to me to practise with no real obstacles to worry about either.

The only unknown element, is power.

I can power the v0.1 OSD from the telem cable (5V), if I solder the pad, and this is recommended since there are stories of overheating on 12V. No problem there. The GoPro is self powered too, so no problem there either.

It's the tx...It comes with an in-series filter for the balancer port on 2S or 3S, but I'm wondering if my 900mAh Lipo is enough now - It's already powering the APM, 2 x remote LED's, GPS, telemetry, navigation LED's, spektrum rx + telem, the alexmos + 2 x tmotor 2208...and now it will power a 250mW Tx as well.

My 10900mAh flight pack is giving just under 20 mins flight time (landing at 3.5V under load - 3.6/3.7V idle) with gimbal + go pro, but my little 3S is already feeling the strain - the difference between idle and load is 1.5V - 10 mins into flight it's already reading 10.8v, which is worryingly close to the 3.5v alarm!

Can't wait to get this all fired up though...

June 2nd, 2013 was a good field day for photo collection! I flew eight flights with Crimson, the Arducopter hexa with Mikrokopter motors and frame. Five flights were for the "matrix", this summer's big project of comparing the effect of different flight conditions on 3D scan quality. This condition was diffuse lighting, high wind, flying 40m above the canopy, with 50% side overlap. The last three flights were to test our georeferencing method. Jonathan and Dana set out orange buckets over known GPS coordinated, which we will check for error in the georeferenced point cloud built from this day's photos.

The white flags on the ground represent the eight spots the copter landed on in auto landing mode. All eight flights were fully autonomous, all I had to do was rev up the props and enable auto mode, then disable auto mode to cut the motors once it touched back down. The GPS in the copter seems pretty reliable for auto landing, seeing as the copter always landed within the same 2m circle. The white flags coming out of my hat are "antennas" which actually help me gauge the wind speed, because the flags flap more in stronger wind, which I can feel with my head.

This is the ground control station. Aside from the orange bucket and Dana's lunch on the left, everything except the copter, tarp, and umbrella gets packed up into the backpack for easy transport.

This is representative of the eight flights. As you can see, the path sometimes curves. I suspect it is due to the high wind gusts we were flying in. These kind of curves were not present on calm days, so they will hopefully manifest themselves as a measurable difference in scan quality. That is the point of flying the "matrix" of different conditions. This flight is the standard 250x250 meter collection

A typical photo from repetition 1. All photos were very detailed, I'm not seeing any intermittent blurring like I used to with the SD4000 cameras of old. The color is a bit dark, but it looks like this in full sun as well, since the color is always calibrated off of our grey camera card. In the future, we may try using a darker card to obtain brighter pictures. Note the orange bucket on the lower edge of the photo.

Cross posted from the Ecosynth.org blog.

Hey everyone, Here is something cool that I have been working on that I think you may enjoy.

So, I had been pondering how to make an inexpensive variable prop. I was thinking about using a heli head from a hk450 or perhaps a tail rotor. I eventually saw a post here, on diydrones, where a guy was using a tail rotor from a HK500 (can't find post). I got inspired and found a HK600 tail rotor has the same shaft diameter as the turnigy G10 I use on the techpod. this is what I have come up with.
 
I measured 15 degree max forward pitch and 12 degree reverse pitch. at 15 degrees forward pitch it drew 40 amps from a 3 cell lipo and puts out just under 5 lbs thrust.
I got the blades here and the tail rotor assembly here. I removed one side of the tail rotor plates and replaced both the shaft in the tail rotor and the shaft in the motor with one long 5 mm shaft. I had to notch it a few times for the set screws.I then made a plate to help support the rotor plate so I could then brace it with some 4-40 all thread rod and nyloc nutsI also made a custom motor mount for the techpod.
After the motor was secured, I cut out a mount for the pitch servo. Then I cut a hole in the foam so I could attach the servo mount to the techpods rear fuselage brace. I grabbed a bell crank from the local hobby shop and mounted it to the rear brace as well.
I have the techpod mostly assembled and should have the batteries for it later today. I hope to be able to start test flying over the weekend. If everything works out well, I plane on offering this as an mod kit for the techpod.

Check out this and the latest techpod news at Hobbyuav.com

This great Kickstarter near-infrared project blew past their $30,000 target and are now at $61,000, with three days to go. Check out these GoPro farm images above, after NDVI processing and before. 

Latest update here. 

A chance to hear Chris and other movers and shakers speak, coming up later this month in San Francisco. The 3DR team will be there with try and fly platforms as well. Yes this is a shameless sUAS News conference plug. All things being equal video should be available on G+ as it happens.

Drones, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, as the industry refers to them, will be the focus of the Small Unmanned Systems Business Expo at the San Francisco Presidio July 25 -26. Speakers from throughout the country will gather at the Presidio to speak about the huge growth potential of this multifaceted industry.

“With respect to jobs, and economic growth, the UAV industry is set to see a tremendous upswing in the next few years,” says Patrick Egan, American editor of Suasnews.com, and one of the sponsors of the event.

“We are creating the Expo, as a gathering of minds, a place where people can gather, meet, and collaborate in order to further the growth of the industry,” he said.

Speakers will cover the spectrum of the industry, from science and technology to  government regulations and the role of startup.

Tad McGeer, one of the early founders of the industry, will describe his illustrious journey from one of the earliest forays into robotic walking to his latest small vertical –takeoff- and- landing unmanned aircraft.

Chris Norris, CEO of Alta Devices, will talk about his highly efficient (29% ) thin-film, flexible solar cells which can power multiple electronic devices including unmanned vehicles.

Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics and founder of DIYDrones will speak about the manufacturing of current and future uses for small unmanned vehicles.

Dr. John Appleby, currently with the Department of Home Land Security, brings his 35 years of experience at NASA, NOAA, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the stage to provide both background and forecast for the UAV industry.

“This is going to be a very exciting and informative conference,” said startup founder Matt Kirson of AgriFlight.com, “anyone interested in this industry should be there.”

You may register for the Expo here: www.susbexpo.com,  attendance is limited

The Governor of the Great State of Indiana Michael R Pence becomes the first to sign the proclamation declaring August 17, 2013 to be National Model Aviation Day! What about your state? Read the full details here on the AMA blog.

Hello,

Have you been frustrated while searching the DIY Drones blog posts? You may be interested in THIS page that we made after reviewing all 250 blog posts of January 2013. We focused on unmanned aerial-vehicle systems (UAS) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to identify:

• the posts that are closely related to a defined term or topic;
• a list of sources of components, systems or services, as named in the posts;
• other kinds of information from across the January posts.

Next we will review the 279 blog posts of February 2013, followed by the remaining months of 2013 blog posts.

Because of the large number of links, the page may load slower than other pages on the DroneSpeak website.

- John (D.) Githens and Doug (R.D.) Starwalt

(DroneSpeak Administration)

For quite a while, people have been wondering

- When will ESCs be readily available with SimonK firmware pre-flashed?

- When will some easily obtainable ESCs support I2C, so that flight controllers can read motor status?

HobbyKing has provided the answer, with the newly introduced AfroESC.  It's licensed from both SimonK and timecop.

I've started collecting information here, and will update when more information is available.

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2013/07/afro-esc-simonktimecophobbyking.html

(short link)

Highlights:

- SimonK preflashed

- Open Source software

- licensed

The awesome team at Flite Test do a practice rescue mission with ArduCopter, equal parts entertaining and impressive:

Josh gets stranded so we deliver rescue supplies with the ArduCopter 3DR Hexa autonomously using waypoints!

Even though the ArduCopter 3DR Hexa is equipped with FPV, we wanted to deliver the supplies to Josh using only the waypoints and line of sight.

Setting up waypoints is as easy as clicking where you'd like the 3DR Hexa to go!

Chad was shooting aerial video with this AnyCopter Hex customized it with the RCTIMER 2-Axis Brushless Gimbal For GoPro.

Learn more about the ArduCopter 3DR Hexa from 3D Robotics HERE!

See more at Flite Test

From Robohub. Excerpt:

This is the third tutorial in the Up and flying with the AR.Drone and ROS series.

In this tutorial we will:

1. Learn about the AR.Drone’s state feedback (and how it is handled by ROS)
2. Learn about the AR.Drone’s tag detection
3. Program our first ROS nodes: A subscriber and a publisher

In the previous tutorials we:

1. Installed ROS, the AR.Drone driver and AR.Drone keyboard controller then flew the AR.Drone using the provided keyboard controller (link)
2. Learned about ROS communication, setup and then flew the AR.Drone using a joystick (link)

In the next tutorials, we will:

• Write a controller to enable tag following

• Write a controller for the drone which allows us to control drone velocity, rather than body angle

Read more here

Hello,

In the DIY series, I built a Boxrover on the basis of a plastic food container, APM2.5 with GPS and telemetry, 2S Battery and a HK cheapo frame for the body (monster beatle, it comes with a 25 amps ESC and a brushless motor:

I removed the ugly HK cover to replace it with a plastic box. It is a nice soft plastic, resistant to shocks and easy to drill with a dremel like tool.

A small keychain HD camera is fixed with velcro. The box itself is fixed with dremellized holes, hot glue and a velcro band all around the frame.

One of the point to pay attention to is the parameters in the ardurover that govern the accelerations and speed. Indeed with thesse cheapo frame from HK, the spur gear is in nylon and can easily be shredded (like I did after the first ten minutes...buy replacement parts immediately)

I used version 2.42 of the ardurover firmware.

I tried a simple auto mission with one waypoint and that does not work well because the autopilot must probably calculate the trajectory based on B-splines (although I did not check the code) : instead of going in a straight line to the waypoint , it makes all sorts of arabesques.

However, as expected from bi-splines, when adding lots of waypoints, it goes all right.

I have a very bad video of my first auto Boxrover mission (sorry for the bad video quality, using a phone in the hands of my son, and he is not equipped with a brushless gimbal, yet :)

Hello,

I am trying out different DIY, cheap approaches to be used as alternatives to expensive carbon plates. When you need strong, rigid plates that are light enough for a Quad, you're stuck with either fiberglass which is not so light and has the unconvenience of being  not so rigid (except in higher thickness wich is than even heavier), either with carbon plates that have other disadvantages : price, it is a conductor material and therefore gets in the path of radio waves. They are also difficicult to shape, cut and drill (plus their dust is toxic).

Therefore, I was wondering how we could find alternate materials, which would replace the above described GF/CF plates by having a good compromise on these criteria : to remain light, strong and rigid, to be cheap, to be able to home build them with basis off-the-shelve components, to not interfere as much with radio waves as full carbon plates.

I experimented previously succesfuly with a DIY plate, baptised Hugues'plate in the following excellent post of Frantz :

Frantz post about building copter with tubes

The result was this:

In this first version I used two thin balsa plates, with in the middle a sandwich of epoxy, and a cotton fabric (cotton provides very strong fibers in all directions, therefore reinforcing the linear fiber pattern of balsa wood). It gave pretty good results.

However the fact of having the external sides of the plate as balsa wood was not a good idea, because we all know in the boom theory and practice that the most external layers of a boom support the tension of the load. Therefore to obtain a more rigid plate, you need the most external layers of the plate to be stiffer and stronger than the inner core.

Solution is easy : reverse the sandwich.

This is what I tried herebelow but experimening other materials. I used still a 1.5mm balsa plate as the inner core. Then on both sides I applied first some UHU epoxy:

This is slow cure epoxy. Very messy but very strong. Even stronger when you heat it up during the drying phase. What is also a good trick to apply such epoxy in thin layers on a plate : mix well the two components in a heat resistant cup. Then take the air dryer of your wife (I already took her cotton fabric so she's getting used to my experiments) and blow hot air on the mix. You will get a very liquid exposy that you can apply with a paint brush quite easily on large surfaces.

Secondly, I applied kind of pultruded carbon "fabric", it is less than one mm thick and comes in rolls covered by a plastic sheet, very convenient to apply in laminated construction, without the epoxy coming through on your fingers:

The result is a balsa plate covered with this carbon laminated thing. Problem is that these are fibers aligned in one direction and it is very brittle if you flex it perpendicular to the fiber's direction.

Therefore I applied a second layer of a kind of very light cotton fabric that we call here "Japan paper"; it looks like this:

As I did not have anymore epoxy, I reverted as a second choice to wood glue to apply this fabric. I used that one:

I like this wood gllue because it is very fast set and quite strong. Much more than the usual white wood glue.

The plate was then put under pressure for a night.

The final result looks like this (close up of the sandwich):

Now some numbers:

Dimensions are : 2,9mm thick - 13 cm by 14,5 cm.

Mass is 26 grams.

Volumetric mass (Density) is thus : 0,47 grams per cubic centimeter.

Rigidity is excellent and I will use it as an attachment plate between my X8 and my brushless gimbal.

I've been working for the last few weeks on developing a parachute recovery system for E382s to reduce the need for manual flying. I know from my own experience that any time a human is at the controls, the risk of crashing is significantly higher. Parachutes have been made for small aircraft before but they're often implemented in an expensive or complicated way. The idea here is to make a simple, working parachute that reduces the overall risk of damaging the aircraft, is simple to use and cheaper to install.

Building the parachute itself was pretty easy, I used this gore size calculator by Scott Bryce and just printed the gores out as patterns. I accidentally printed the pattern out on 8.5x11 instead of 11x17 so this parachute is actually only 22" diameter - much smaller than what it should be for this weight. The gores are cut out of black rip stop nylon and just sewn together. The lines are attached at 8 points, with the lines simply tied through button holes. The line I used is too thin to be sewn into the material but I prefer the thin line, made of kevlar, for its weight and size.

Next I ran a few tests using some dummy mass at about the same weight as an E382, 1.70 kg, to see how quickly it would fall and if it would even open up properly. The first few tests were done with the parachute already pretty much deployed as it was from a pretty low altitude off my building's fire escape.

I thought the speed it hit at was slow enough, despite the smaller chute size, to not significantly damage an airframe and decided to move on with the tests. So I attached the parachute to a light-weight (1.5kg) airframe to see how it would fall and if the wings would affect the speed significantly. Because of the smaller size of the parachute, the airframe was actually still had almost enough lift to fly itself. So as it fell and built up speed, it would begin to pull out of the dive, then the parachute would slow its horizontal movement and it would stall, then presumably repeat until it hit the ground. In a few of the tests, the parachute line also got caught under the horizontal stabilizer, further complicating the problem.

Not wanting to call it a day, I pressed on to simulate the actual deployment. Ideally, the parachute would deploy on its own, be near the center of gravity and allow the plane to fall down roughly level and impact the ground on its belly. That all points to a deployment from on top of the wings, right in front of the motor. On the first try, I loosely packed the parachute on top of the wing and just tossed it. This allowed it to catch wind almost immediately which promptly pushed it straight back into the tail, where it lodged itself, allowing the plane to crash at high speed.

But I tried again, packing the parachute more tightly so it would roll out past the tail in a compact ball before opening up and catching wind. That did the trick! The dive/stall issue is still there but that should be fixed with the next parachute build.

All four tests above plus one more live deployment test on a flying plane are in the video below.

Would you ever use a parachute as your primary recovery mechanism? Why or why not?

I am a member of a French yahoo group on 3D printing. Today a member posted a link to this nice brushless gimbal that he designed for the GoPro hero3 and posted on Thingiverse. he did not reference the controller he is using but he published the design files here.

Since my last post From Nothing To Landing, some reader interested in my training curriculum. A few reader also point out that education is very important and actually essential to be success in UAV operation.

Here I share my " home made " UAV training program for a group of six students. They are from the GIS department of a plantation company. 

Day 1

Safety and precaution of radio control electric power UAV system

Introduction to radio control and APM auto pilot

Basic aerodynamic for aeroplane

Introduction to basic radio control plane and flight control

Basic computer simulation training

Day 2

computer simulation training

Basic radio control set up

Introduction to radio control flying in auto pilot assisted stabilize mode at STC ( our local flying field )

Day 3

Introduction to Mission Planner

Plan your first mission

Ground control station monitoring

Advance computer simulation training

Traffic pattern flight training

Take off ( hand launch ) and landing practice in auto mode

Day 4

Advance computer simulation training

APM set up and basic PID tuning

Plan and fly mission in hardware-in-the-loop computer  simulation

Traffic pattern at lower altitude

Low pass

Advance radio control airplane flying in manual mode

Day 5

Advance computer simulation training on landing approach

Navigation turning and crosstrack adjustment

Land approach practice in autopilot assisted stabilized mode

These is the general guild line of the training program. we have quite a lot of interaction with the students and sometime we will not follow the guide line but focus on what the students need.   

This training program certainly not endorse by anyone and far from ideal. I just share what I've done and hopefully fellow DIYdroner will trow in their ideas to make the program better.

Hi all,

My motivation to get involved in the development team was to bring a good ACRO mode to ArduCopter. Three or four months ago Robert Lefebvre suggested that we could integrate the rate error and use it to correct the platform in the body frame. He went on to demonstrate this on Heli's. We have since learned that MultiWii use a similar approach and code was developed by Bob Dorion based on MultiWii and discussed here http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/flipping-arducopter.

I have taken Robert's approach and integrated it with the current ACRO trainer aids with the help of Robert and Bob. Here is the result:

ArduCopterACRO.zip

This code is based on ArduCopter 3.01rc1 so if you haven't got this flying yet, don't bother with this code.

Changes:

Replace Earth Frame ACRO with Body Frame ACRO

Reduce the dead band on the roll and pitch inputs

In the same way as you could before you can disable all trainer functions by setting
ACRO_BAL_PITCH,0
ACRO_BAL_ROLL,0
ACRO_TRAINER,0

For my flight testing I have been using:
ACRO_BAL_PITCH,50
ACRO_BAL_ROLL,50
ACRO_P,4.5
ACRO_TRAINER,0

Things to discuss are:

Is the performance acceptable?

What additional features are needed? (switched trainer functions, zero throttle doesn't stop motors)

Is there a better algorithm?

Do you see any problems with the code?

How does the performance and feel compare with other systems? (please only comment if you have flown those systems and this system on a well set up copter, anything less is a waist of every bodies time)

I have spent at least 20 minutes doing nothing but flips and rolls of various combinations and mixtures and a similar amount of time doing yank and bank maneuvers. I have not found a problem or any bad habits.

I look forward to your feedback and ideas.

I now have an RCTimer OpenSource BGC board ("Martinez") and a couple of LD-Power Gimbal Motors which are large enough for an NEX or smaller.  I looked over a number of BGC frames for sale but they all seem to incorporate metal or glass fibre, both of which do not have the same strength and low weight of carbon fibre.  Based on the connection system I had used on the first CF gimbal I built from scratch (servo based), I have come up with this design with the size needed for a Sony NEX and the adjust-ability to balance for any camera of that size or smaller to maintain roll balance.  Also, the base plate the camera sits on is deep enough to move the camera back to balance the weight on the pitch axis due to the size of the NEX lenses.  

Once I have hand crafted this design I'll post some video.  From there, if there is enough interest I may get a batch of these laser cut and put them up for sale.  Roughly $30 of 2mm CF board for this and whatever the rate is for laser cutting.

This specific design is for the LD-Power GM4008-57 motors which are 45mm in diameter, 21mm in depth and 85g each.  Still need to work out how many poles these motors have to be able to set up the firmware correctly.  If anyone knows please let me know?  I was planning on using the smaller LD-Power 2208 gimbal motor which was 39g or so but the eBay seller had the wrong picture and weight in the listing.