I was flying my hexacopter at a local school on june 22. Everything started out great. I was flying it in auto, loiter, guided, and RTL mode. While i was flying my hexacopter started drifting away because of the wind. At witch point i brought it back and tried moving the throttle down to land it, but the throttle wasn't working. I decided to flip the switch and put it into RTL mode, after that the whole thing died, the motors lost power and fell out of the sky. Im not shure exactly what happend but i think the throttle wire fell out.

Here is a short build log of how I converted my APM2.5 Quad to a X8 Octo quad.

First I dismounted everything which is always a pain, especially when you have to disconnect these little bastard DF13 connectors. By doing so a few times already (it is my fourth build with same APM...), I had finally to replace the telemetry cable by a new one. Oh well not too bad...

I could scrap the base 3DR power distribution board which was not meant for 8 ESCs and I got instead a vulcanUAV PDB which allows for (way too) many ESCs and 250 amps as seen on this picture.

I soldered also a 3DR power module and connected a Y battery splitter to be able to connect two batteries in parallel.

I prepared the motors. These are 3110-17 (700Kv) tiger motors. I love 'em. As you notice on the picture, I took my lessons from the first builds : every part is now tagged, either with a number, either with a color sticker, in order to know what motors goes on which arm and which cable connects to which ESCs (and so to keep the correct spin direction).

These motor cables are quite long so I decided to braid them, giving an extra EMI improvement and shortening them a bit:

By dismounting the quad, I noticed that the four screws holding the motors to their motor plate came a little bit loose, due to vibrations. I do not want on these parts to use blue loctite because it is a a nightmare to unscrew (for my next fifth build...). I used instead some hot glue as seen there:

(yeah, I know, I had to mix different screws, not pretty but who cares, nobody sees the bottom motor plate anyway...)

Then I laid on the floor the bottom plate, passed the braided motor cables in the arms, connected all the motor cables to the ESCs (thanks to the color stickers), placed the cables as neatly as possible. I shortened the ESCs power cables to the minimum in order to gain a clean placement. I soldered directly the ESCs to the PDB (no risk of bad connectors). By the way, a lesson I've learnt when you solder so much on a board : get a very high power solder iron otherwise the heat latency of the board gets unmanageable (and gets worse for every ESCs that is added).

I decided to keep only one BEC power cable from one of the ESCs. The other are snugged under the PDB (No, I did not cut them, you never know what will be needed in a next build)

Then it was time to work on the APM itself and all of its accesories : receiver, beeper, telemetry, GPS, etc. In order to get vibrations as low as possible, I tried what you see on the picture : APM is mounted on a small plate about 3cm above the center plate, with rubber dampers-white nylon spacer-silicon damper (what you see between the two metal washers).

This carbon fiber plate is thus never in direct contact with the rest of the frame. APM itself is placed on four corners of moongel (I put a balse plate between the carbon plate and APM to raise it a bit so that APM does not touch the metallic washers).

APM is pressed gently on the moongel with two rubber bands. Later on, after I attached the GPS, I also improved a bit the vibrations levels by adding moongel between the GPS on top of APM and the APM case, so that the APM is sandwiched between two layers of moongel.

 This is how the Electronics look once finalized and all cabled.

Then I took the beast out for a short maiden flight as seen in the video herebelow:

So when i first got into copters, i saw i could but all sorts of frame, but to be honest, they were boring and more importantly it was not  challenge or any fun to just build a out of box frame, so i decided i would laser cut my own frames.

Now i will point out, i sell these frames, but i can also design a custom frame for you, the frames sell for $30 each

a custom frame costs $35.

I can also custom make other things for you that use the laser cutter.

The frames can also be made form various color acrylic if you do not want plywood.

they cost $40 as acrylic is far more expensive,

Contact me Jared_reabow@hotmail.co.uk

Skype ox141jf@hotmail.co.uk

Hi everyone! I am finally ready to show off something I've been working on for months! It's a motherboard (which I am calling the MAXboard) that all the various electronics for a multirotor aircraft plug into. It eliminates pretty much any possible wiring mistakes, and all soldering. It makes it much easier to build, repair, and upgrade your aircraft.

This is an open source project, and am I running a Kickstarter campain to get some funds to continue development. I am also really hoping to get the support of the DIY Drones community to help me test it and work out bugs.

There is also a frame I designed to go with it as well as a ground station I think you'll like. I'll post more information on those, as well as some videos, soon.

For more info, or to help support the project, please take a look at my Kickstarter. Thanks! http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1703258614/maxrotor-open-source-plug-and-play-modular-quadcop

SO i have been on the lookout for a camera gimbal to lift some heft cameras over 2kg but everything i could find was at least $200 whilst the smaller gimbels for DSLR camera were a minimum of $150

This was frustrating for me, i could not understand why the prices were so exorbitant, this frustration was made even worse when i found out go pro gimbles came in at $70 whith really crappy ones being cheaper, so i decided to make and sell my own.

I will sell my predesigned one, or can make various different designs for smaller or bigger cameras and copter, with or without legs etc, to make a final design custom gimble i charge $5, a rough sketch is free.

So contact me to discuss custom gimbels or negotiate a purchase.

Contact me at Jared_reabow@homtail.co.uk

Skype on on ox141jf@hotmail.co.uk

This is what i came up with

I will design a mount plate to suit you, however you wish it to mount, you can with the 4 holes in the top that i have since added you can mount using heavy duty elastic bands to reduce vibration. or fix t directly to the frame with cable ties.

It is designed to work with or without servos as a free floating gimble which means it uses gravity to keep the camera level or uses servos which allow you to manually tilt the camera and stabilize with a stabilization board such as the apm

I will not include the servos so you can choose whtever servos you like, the current mount method for the servos has one slotting into the center as you can see in the first photo and the other mounted on top glue in place for added strength.

Both can use wire/string or control horns to connect the servos to the frame, it is entirely up to you guys.

IF you want me to mount the servos and add servos to the gimbal i will charge  $20 to make a total of $70

Contact me at Jared_reabow@homtail.co.uk

Skype on on ox141jf@hotmail.co.uk

The new design of the Mugin UAV 3M is out.

It's a huge UAV platform with 300 mm wingspan. The platform caters to larger UAS projects such as universities or commercial projects. It's really not a beginner platform.

The platform is available here: Mugin UAV 3m vIII

It comes with or without engine/prop.

Twin Motor

Type: Two-stroke piston valve petrol aircraft engine
Displacement: 55cc(27.2ccx2)
Bore x Stroke: 34mm×30mm
Carburettor: Walbro(Diaphragm & Butterfly Valve)
Max. Output: 5.6ps/7600rpm
RPM Range: 1600-7800rpm
Weight: About 1780g（Engine+muffler+CDI）
Ignition power: Auto advanced CDI(DC 4.8 Volts , 4 cell NiCad or NiMh battery)
Fuel mixture(Ratio of gasoline and oil): 25-40 : 1
Propeller: 20X12-23X8 two-blade prop( suggest to use 22x8 prop)

Hello to all. This is my first post and I am hoping to raise some awareness of how UAV's can help in the fight against poaching. There is an organisation called the International Anti Poaching Foundation (IAPF) which is dedicated to stopping the slaughter of endangered species in Africa. Some of the videos on the website made me sick, to think poachers kill these magnificent animals just for their tusks and horns that are used in useless Chinese remedies is nothing short of a disgrace and travesty on the human race.

These guys are just starting to use drones to track poachers and they need our help. They currently have 2 in the air and are in the process of preparing another 5. This is their own UAV program and is fully funded by donations. If you are truly interested in taking your drone skills to the ultimate level then please do what you can to help. Make no mistake about it, this is a war they are fighting. Hunting and capturing poachers and protecting wildlife is a full time job. The organisation is run by an ex SAS (Special Forces) soldier from the Australian Army. Some of the accounts from engagements with poachers are terrifying and usually end in shoot outs no different to a warfare situation. Rangers have been killed trying to protect these animals. The 2 drones they do have have saved their lives many times.

As an ex Royal Australian Air Force missile engineer I am just starting to help them out and I will do whatever I can. But as a newbie to the drone community I am here to get information and toss some ideas around, raise awareness and also see what equipment people are willing to donate or to help out in whatever way they can. There are 39000 members of this community, if 1 in 1000 can help out even in the smallest way you can contribute, the difference you will make will be greatly appreciated.

Flying a drone around the neighbourhood is fun but to lend our skills to this, to me is the ultimate use of this technology and my years of training in guided missile electronics and control systems. Please contribute anyway you can.

So its over to you guys and lets see what we can do.

Comments please

Best Regards

Michael

Good interview with ArduCopter flier John Vigg in Vice Magazine's The Creators Project. Excerpt:

John Vigg thinks everyone should have a personal drone. Maybe you’d use yours to uphold national security, or maybe you’d have tacos delivered to your apartment. Whatever. 

While people have been strapping high-def cameras to their heads and helmets for years now, Vigg still thinks they’re missing the point. He’s going for a new aesthetic. In the search for this “new aesthetic,” Vigg has designed and programmed drones armed with cameras to fly over various areas that are otherwise unreachable by foot. 

His interest was piqued by a section of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. According to Google Maps, there was a housing development in the middle of this vast stretch of untouched land, when in fact trees were the only inhabitants of this remote area. “Google Earth made a mistake, and I wanted to get in there,” says Vigg.

In Vigg’s words, his drones help him “describe contemporary landscape and the changes in current aesthetics while investigating the production of space.” In his most recent work, Vigg pushes the limits of what photography can do with an eye toward traditional landscapes. In order to capture the precise images that he wanted (when conventional means of capturing aerial shots – like kites and balloons – weren’t cutting it) he made drones using the same high-tech equipment scientists are using in unmanned aerial vehicles.

“I’m looking to get the look of the drone. I want to use what everyone has access to. It’s about accepting what this technology is going to give us and looking at the aesthetics and the pleasing nature of that,” he says. In an age where Google Maps and Google Earth have become our preliminary peep show of physical experience, Vigg’s taking the concept a step further, venturing into territory where no Street View car has gone before. 

How did you get the idea to work with drones?

I came across several air bases [on Google Maps and Google Earth] that had drones on them, so I started making drawings of the drones. I needed an idea for more advanced aerial shots and here I’d already been investigating these top secret air bases. I’d had them on my brain for weeks. So I started researching how to produce my own. 

How did you build and program the drones?

I build my own frames because they hold the electronics I like. I source parts from all over the place. The bulk of it is from 3D Robotics. The programming is all open source. You literally click points on the Google Map to tell this thing where to fly. I use GoPro cameras. When I first started, it was with a GoPro 2. I was having trouble with the image resolution, but closer to the tail end is when the GoPro 3 came out. It offers much better image quality and can tether the drones to my iPhone, offering more maneuverability in the air. It helped a lot; it was really a saving grace. It took off so much technology from the drone itself. 

Read the rest here

The CanberraUAV Outback Challenge team has put together a package that will allow anyone to try the image recognition system we developed for our successful 2012 OBC entry. We hope that by releasing this in an easier to use form that other OBC teams and anyone interested in image recognition in UAVs will be able to reproduce what we've done and build upon it for their own systems.

The fundamental problem that our system is meant to solve is providing real-time recognition of objects on the ground from a UAV, while requiring only a low bandwidth radio link between the aircraft and the ground station. A lot of UAVs are run using analog video links from the plane to the ground, but we think that is not a good way to do many search and rescue and environmental tasks. The problems with an analog video link are:

• the quality of the video is often greatly degraded by being sent over the analog link, making it hard to spot small objects
• the task of an operator staring at a video screen for hours is much too hard. The operator may notice something flash by, then has to decide whether to rewind (possibly missing something else in the search) or to skip the object
• in many (most?) parts of the world analog video links may violate local radio licensing regulations

We think the solution is for the aircraft to do an initial pass of image recognition to find "interesting" objects on the ground, and then to show small (low bandwidth) thumbnails of those objects on the ground station, overlaid on a satellite map of the area. The operator can then select which of these thumbnails to look at more closely, bringing down a full high resolution image around that object from the plane over the telemetry link when needed. When using this method the operator gets a complete overview of the search area, and can quickly focus on areas of interest, using the human to decide which of the objects that the computer shows up are worth investigating. That was the strategy we successfully used in our 2012 OBC flight.

Up to now the image recognition code we developed for that competition was fairly deeply embedded in the MAVProxy module we used, making it hard for other teams or UAV researchers to run the algorithm over their own data to see how it performs. So to address that we have now put together a set of packages that can be installed on Linux, Windows or MacOS to try the system for yourself.

The new tool is called geosearch.py, and is a standalone UAV search tool that operates offline on a set of images, using either EXIF positioning data in the images, or a MAVLink telemetry log for geo-referencing. It runs the same code that we use in our real-time system embedded in the aircraft, but converted to run as a local GUI tool on a desktop computer. Note that the algorithms we use are tuned for speed. They are not state of the art computer vision algorithms, but they are fast, allowing them to run in real-time on a low power ARM Linux box embedded in an aircraft. We originally tried to use algorithms from the excellent OpenCV system, but found them too slow for our application. We do however use some OpenCV helper functions in our code to make the system a bit simpler.

Release of data from our OBC flight

As a companion to this tool we have released the images captured from our OBC 2012 flight for anyone to download, along with the telemetry logs and other files needed to reproduce the result. The images are kindly hosted by CSIRO in Australia, and are available from the CSIRO Outback Challenge website.

On that site you will find a set of 20 zip files containing the raw images from our flight. If you download and extract those zip files you will end up with a directory called 'raw' which contains 17042 pgm image files. Those files are 8 bit raw Bayer grid files of 1280x960, which are the raw images from our PtGrey Chameleon camera. We're hoping those files will be useful to anyone wanting a decent sized set of UAV images for research, or for training an algorithm for the next Outback Challenge.

(NOTE: as of the time of writing the CSIRO site has the images as 17k separate image files, those should be converted to the 20 zip files for easier download soon).

We also provide a tool called pgm_convert.py which will take those pgm raw images and convert them to other formats, most commonly to lossless PNG files.

How to try our system for yourself

If you watch the video and want to try our system on your own data, or on the data from our OBC flight, then you will need to install a set of python packages that provide the basic system tools we use in our code.

On Windows you need Python 2.7, plus a set of extra python packages. To make life easier for windows users we have collected all of the packages you need in this directory. Note that this includes both the packages needed to run our tools, and the packages needed to build our tools for yourself for when you want to modify the code.On Linux installing the basic python tools is a bit easier. For example, on an Ubuntu Linux system the following command should be enough:

  sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 python-matplotlib python-numpy python-pyexiv2 python-opencv python-httplib2 libjpeg-turbo-progs

If you are using MacOS, then you should install a suitable Python 2.7 package first, then use easy_install to add the required additional packages.

Once you have the basic tools installed, the next step is to install the 3 CanberraUAV python packages, pymavlink, MAVProxy and cuav. You can get those packages from the python packaging index:

• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pymavlink
• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/MAVProxy
• https://pypi.python.org/pypi/cuav

That will allow you to download tar balls or windows installers for each package. If you are going to modify the code, then you will be better off downloading the source from our github repository.

To build the packages yourself (instead of using the pre-built packages), you would use the following commands in each of the 3 package directories. For Linux or MacOS, use this:

  python setup.py build install --user

for Windows use this:

  python setup.py build -c mingw32 install

Note that for building on WIndows you also need to install the MinGW package.

How it all works

To see how it all works, you can either read the code (just follow the above links to our code repository) or you can watch a presentation I gave in January 2012 which explains the algorithm to some extent (video and slides).

We'd also encourage you to ask questions on the CanberraUAV mailing list, or on the Outback Challenge discussion group.

How much bandwidth does it use?

The aim of this system is to allow for real-time UAV search with only a low bandwidth telemetry link to the aircraft. It is possible to run the system with a 64 kbit/s ISM band radio, such as the excellent RFD900 radio.

To make this possible we developed a new network transport protocol called block_xmit (mp4-video, ogg-video, slides, implementation), which allows us to intermix low bandwidth thumbnail images and python objects with normal MAVLink telemetry over a single radio link. The system also scales up to higher bandwidth links, so if you happen to have a high bandwidth ethernet bridge (such as a Ubiquity Bullet) in your aircraft, and you are close enough to the ground station to have a good link, then the system will transmit real-time images that gives the effect of a digital video link. That capability can be seen in the demonstration video above.

The block_xmit protocol also prioritizes images based on the image score from the recognition algorithm, so you can set quite a low threshold for what images to send, and if a high scoring object (such as Joe!) turns up it will jump the queue in the radio link and be shown to the operator quickly.

For our aircraft we combine both types of radio link, with the results of our imaging system coming over both a 5.8GHz Ubiquity ethernet bridge and a 900MHz RFD900 telemetry radio (with smaller thumbnail sizes to save bandwidth). That gives us redundancy in case a particular radio technology does not perform well on the day.

Geo-referencing

Included in the system is a geo-referencing system that uses the MAVLink telemetry stream along with image timestamps to work out the geographic location (latitude/longitude) of any region of interest in the image. These are displayed on the map in various formats (degrees decimal, degrees/minutes/seconds and UTM grid coordinates).

If you instead have a camera with a built-in GPS that tags images with EXIF geo-referencing tags the the code can instead use those for geo-referencing. That tends to result in much less accuracy however, as the EXIF tags don't contain nearly as much information about the aircraft attitude, which makes a big difference.

Also note that our current system uses local timestamps in the raw pgm filenames to work match the time to the MAVLink log. That is a mistake which we will fix in a future release. It means that if you are using our OBC data in a timezone other than Queensland you need to use the time offset option in the geosearch.py program to adjust the time to match the times in the MAVLink log. For example, if you are perth, which is 2 hours west of Queensland, then you would use an offset of -7200 seconds.

Next Steps

Some parts of our algorithm were tuned for the expected object sizes of the OBC competition (about 2 meters by 0.5 meters) and for the altitude and images sizes we used. We'd like to parametrize those aspects of the code to make it easier to use for a wider variety of tasks and camera systems.

We'd also like to make it easier to plug in different scoring filters. The recognition algorithm works in two stages, a first stage that finds anything unusual in the image, then a second stage that converts that region to HSV colour space and applies some simple heuristics to score the region. We'd like users to be able to easily plugin different scoring systems to suit their own image search task, as not everyone is looking for a lost hiker wearing blue jeans and a yellow shirt!

We are also interested in adapting our system to thermal cameras, such as the Tamarisk 640, and we hope to do some testing with that system later this year.

Please share your improvements

If you use this code in your own system then please share your improvements! You can clone our repository on github, or post an issue, or just discuss your changes on our mailing list. If we work together we can create a system which will end up saving lives, so please don't just keep your improvements to yourself.

The above flight track highlights the performance of the latest version of the navigation algorithms in MatrixPilot. Flight tracks are from a flight that Peter Hollands conducted. (Thank you, Peter.) The red and the green tracks represent flight segments in opposite directions between the same pair of waypoints. The tracks are nearly perfect straight lines 243 meters long, with deviation between the two tracks of no more than 3 meters, in heavy winds. You will have to look closely at the picture, the two tracks are nearly on top of each other.

Winds are shown in the following picture.

This precision navigation is the result of several recent innovations in the MatrixPilot algorithms. The main innovation is from Paul Bizard, and has to do with using IMU course over ground instead of heading for navigation. (Thank you Paul.) Paul has taken us full circle on this:

1. The first version of MatrixPilot used GPS course over ground for navigation. This had the advantage of not needing wind information, but suffered from GPS latency.

2. The next version of MatrixPilot used IMU heading for navigation. This eliminated GPS latency effects, but required wind to be included in navigation computations.

3. The next version of MatrixPilot used IMU for position estimation.

4. Recently, Paul pointed out that the MatrixPilot IMU furnishes course over ground, and that would be much better than heading for navigation. So we went full circle, we are back to course over ground. But now it comes from the IMU, not GPS, so there are no latency effects.

We also made several other improvements to the navigation algorithms:

1. We totally eliminated the use of angles in the navigation computations, everything is now based on vectors or matrices.

2. We are using 32 bit integer arithmetic in several places. This combines ultra-fine resolution with wide range.

3. We added a cross-track velocity damping term. This allows the cross tracking gains to be turned up without inducing a "dutch roll".

For more information on MatrixPilot, see its diydrones page, or its website.

Best regards,

Bill Premerlani

I don't know if you are aware of that but on RCGroups is a very interesting thread started by a guy who is achieving pretty amazing flight times. And other than some other people who showed up also here, he is talking about HOW in every detail!

=> http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1880665

A simple, cheap infrared camera which can measure plant health -- for geek gardeners, farmers, and open source DIY scientists.

What is Infragram?

Infragram is a simple, affordable near-infrared camera produced by the Public Laboratory community in a series of collaborative experiments over the last few years. We originally developed this technology to monitor wetlands damages in the wake of the BP oil spill, but its simplicity of use and easy-to-modify open-source hardware & software makes it a useful tool for home gardeners, hikers, makers, farmers, amateur scientists, teachers, artists, and anyone curious about the secret lives of plants.

http://www.kickstarter.com/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/06/19/3d-printing-company-makerbot-acquired-in-604-million-deal/?partner=yahootix

So Bre Pettis finally sold Makerbot Industries for 1/2 billion dollars. It definitely puts your monthly ABS budget & the concerns of whether to splurge on the 2 color extruder in perspective when you realize the founder walked away with at least 1/4 billion dollars.

Once again, it's not the revenue from Makerbot sales or speculation on the value of being able to print goods, but the enormous library of widgets users of the Makerbot submitted to thingiverse.com for free, over 100,000 in total, & which Bre was able to monetize with the acquisition. Like the instagram & tumblr acquisitions, a massive amount of data was created for free while the true value of it was monetized by just a few individuals. Is that the way open source hardware is supposed to work?


The answer we're supposed to give is yes, the world should be based on legions of people producing data for free & the true value of that data being concentrated into 1 top individual in these massive buyouts. The creators of the data should not be compensated because we all want to be the top guy.


We've had these massive payouts for data since the internet got big in 1999 & the amount of data that cost nothing to download became truly massive. Initially they were in the form of the Redhat, VA Research IPOs, later in the form of the modern social network giga acquisitions, maybe now the open hardware giga acquisitions. 

The concept of data that we create in full faith that it's supposedly free having a massive amount of monetary value in the invisible hand of the economy isn't going away.  Neither is a landlord going to turn around & open source his rental properties just because we provided the data that paid for his assets for free.  It's well known that wealth is being concentrated at the top a lot more than it ever was & times are much harder for the rest of us than our parents.


But what if the creators of the data were compensated in the buyouts instead of the total amount being focused at the top guy? Would the creators of the data not be able to hire people on their own, create jobs, buy stuff on their own?

The FBI has admitted it sometimes uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and suggested further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary.

Speaking in a hearing mainly about telephone data collection, the bureau's director, Robert Mueller, said it used drones to aid its investigations in a "very, very minimal way, very seldom".

However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.

"It is still in nascent stages but it is worthy of debate and legislation down the road," said Mueller, in response to questions from Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono.

Hirono said: "I think this is a burgeoning concern for many of us."

Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.

"Our footprint is very small," Mueller told the Senate judiciary committee. "We have very few and have limited use."

He said the FBI was in "the initial stages" of developing privacy guidelines to balance security threats with civil liberty concerns.

It is known that drones are used by border control officials and have been used by some local law enforcement authorities and Department of Homeland Security in criminal cases.

Mueller said he wasn't sure if there were official agreements with these other agencies.

"To the extent that it relates to the air space there would be some communication back and forth [between agencies]," Mueller said.

A Senate intelligence committee member, Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, later questioned whehter such use of drones was constitutional. "Unmanned aerial systems have the potential to more efficiently and effectively perform law enforcement duties, but the American people expect the FBI and other government agencies to first and foremost protect their constitutional rights," Udall said in a prepared statement.

"I am concerned the FBI is deploying drone technology while only being in the 'initial stages' of developing guidelines to protect Americans' privacy rights. I look forward to learning more about this program and will do everything in my power to hold the FBI accountable and ensure its actions respect the US constitution."

Another senator, Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, also expressed concern. Asked whether the FBI drones were known about before the Mueller hearing, Grassley told CNN "absolutely not." Grassley added the FBI was asked last year whether agents were using drones but the bureau never got back with an answer.

At the same hearing, Mueller urged Congress to move carefully before making any changes that might restrict the National Security Agency programs for mass collection of people's phone records and information from the internet.

"If we are to prevent terrorist attacks, we have to know and be in their communications," said Mueller. "Having the ability to identify a person in the United States, one telephone number with a telephone that the intelligence community is on in Yemen or Somalia or Pakistan ... may prevent that one attack, that Boston or that 9/11."

The FBI director argued for the continued use of the NSA programs. "Are you going to take the dots off the table, make it unavailable to you when you're trying to prevent the next terrorist attack? That's a question for Congress," said Mueller.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/19/fbi-drones-domestic-surveillance

hello everyone, after two weeks of settings and adjustments, the achievement RVJET fly with APM 2.5 in auto mode
Flying weight: 2750 grams
autopilot: APM 2.5
Motor: 3020 1110kv scorpion
prop: 10x6
Battery: 1 x 5000 + 1 x 3000

firmware : arduplane 2.73

RVJET.param

My quad is flying better than it should.  I almost feel guilty.

I slapped together a frame in a few hours.  I use cheap props mounted on long shafts with cheap collets.  The motors are not precisely aligned to the frame.  The props are not balanced perfectly.  Motor centers form a rectangle not a square.  APM is strapped to the frame.  I never bothered to calibrate compassmot.  CG is not in the center of the frame.

However...

Loiter is freaky solid, missions are as boring as dressage, no fly aways, toilet bowling or any other stability problems.  Gopro video is jello free.  With each new firmware version it just keeps getting better and better.  Holds position in wind well.  I have flown several versions of the firmware on this frame and never had a problem with any of them.  Just Dave C tune and go...

I started to think about why it works.  Some of the ideas may help others designing their own frames.

1. vibration has a very hard time reaching the APM.

2. the power distribution board is located far away from the APM

3 the power distribution board is not an electromagnet printed on a circuit board

4 motor wiring is away from the APM

4 The GPS is located away from the power distribution board, ESCs and wiring

5 The frame is very light so current and therefore magnetic fields are reduced

 Vibration is low.  Around "2" in hover

Even with motors just taped to the frame...

APM is just strapped down with velcro.

Good power distribution method?                                                             Bad power distribution method?

GPS is away from most RF and in null of telemetry antenna.  GoPro on or off does not seem to bother it.  I do shift the battery a little to help balance.

Hope some of the ideas are useful.  This type of frame makes a great EPP "trainer".  There is more info that was posted here:

http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/pool-noodles

Novel application of 3D printing could enable the development of miniaturized medical implants, compact electronics, tiny robots, and more. It will probably take a while before this will be used for the hobby markt, but I though the story is nice enough to blog about it.

3D printing can now be used to print lithium-ion microbatteries the size of a grain of sand. The printed microbatteries could supply electricity to tiny devices in fields from medicine to communications, including many that have lingered on lab benches for lack of a battery small enough to fit the device, yet provide enough stored energy to power them.

More information at: http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/114

Hi Everyone,

Designed for a duration of four days at 65,000 feet. The first flight was just 28 minutes and it sustained damage on landing, but otherwise the mission was a success. ]UPDATE: This was a year ago, sorry for missing that. It's taken several flight since then]

Via RobotDreams:

Boeing's unmanned aircraft, Phantom Eye, completed its first take off and landing June 1. The autonomous aircraft, with its 150-foot wingspan and powered by energy-efficient liquid hydrogen, lifted off its launch cart and climbed to an altitude of 4,080 feet into the desert sky above Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.