FromAGBeat (via Hacker News)

New Hampshire bill proposes aerial photography ban

Neal Kurk (R), member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 1986 has recently sponsored HB 619-FN to make aerial photography illegal in their state, which many are considering a look into the future. States are currently struggling with how to deal with advances in drone technology, particularly mini-drones, fueled by fears not only that the federal government is using drones on U.S. soil, but are using them abroad not only to take out terrorists, but suspected terrorists, even if American.

Much media attention has been showered on the topic, bringing light to the full array of uses, not just the CIA’s implementation of the technologies. According to Fox News, the Federal Aviation Administration has already granted 327 licenses, and it projects as many as 10,000 licensed systems by 2017.

New Hampshire’s proposed aerial photography ban states the following:

"A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor if such person knowingly creates or assists in creating an image of the exterior of any residential dwelling in this state where such image is created by or with the assistance of a satellite, drone, or any device that is not supported by the ground. This prohibition shall not apply where the image does not reveal forms identifiable as human beings or man-made objects. In this paragraph, “dwelling” means any building, structure, or portion thereof which is occupied as, or designed or intended for occupancy as, a residence by one or more individuals."

Potential problems with this bill

Although the bill seeks to protect residents from being spied on or documented, it very clearly excludes government officials who may use drones for official business. Most protests against drones are not against hobbyists, Google Maps satellites, or aerial photographers, rather against the government’s use of the devices.

The aerial photography ban is unclear as to the very specific non-threatening uses of aerial devices such as aerial real estate photography for listings, or if a homeowner is photographing their own home, and while it states that “This prohibition shall not apply where the image does not reveal forms identifiable as human beings or man-made objects,” possibly implying that if no human is in any photo or video taken, it is acceptable.

Additionally, it is unclear the implications of this bill on existing Google maps or existing images that have been taken via aerial device, and videography does not seem to be clearly addressed in the bill.

Fines for violations of a bill that could spread to other states

Rep. Kurk proposes a fine for violating the aerial photography ban, costing $62.71 per case in fiscal year 2014, rising to $64.40 per case thereafter, with an estimated $10,000 burden on taxpayers should someone appeal, and of course the $35,000 per year prison cost per person that fails to pay and is arrested.

Real estate photographer Larry Lohrman said, “Based on the public discussion that I’ve seen on this subject, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a wild guess and predict that this is not going to be an isolated incident. My guess is that other states will be doing this too. Particularly since so many cities are resisting use of UAVs by law enforcement.”

The full bill is here.

Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions: patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/unmanned-flight/horgan-text

http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2013/02/19/unmanned-flight-in-the-geographic/

The Project linkall has been founded by Jiaqi Hu and Zebo Sun since Oct 2011. Linkall is considered to be the pioneer in the drones delivery system, which has been developed and researched by our team with all the curiosity and enthusiasm for such a new field.

The technological solution of fully automated end to end drones delivery system by linkall is not just a drone for transportation and delivery, but an totally autocratic and continuous working system. In the very near future, the convenient service provided by linkall will become an indispensable part of your life. Especially, we do not only provide service to urban residents, instead, we hope to serve all the people who need it with no charge, especially those in remote areas.

The making of

Our website：linkall.cc

follow us on twitter  @linkallcc

Now we just have to think in MavLink!

From IO9

Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.

Stefan a member of VirtualRobotix community from spain , doing a great job , one years ago send me first revision of openpilot revision of firmware for VRBrain. 

After some times of development yesterday , doing me a great news,  Stefan send me the VRBrain patch for TauLab project , a fork of openpilot project fully compatible with VRBRAIN.

He add the support of VRBrain directly inside the main code of autopilot and also inside the CGS as is possible to see in the screenshot.

He doing also first flight test :

this is the first video doing in indoor

and outdoor

The test is doing in a windy and cold days.

In this attachment you found the file for upgrade the bootloader of vrbrain and use TauLabs project.

You need to add the patch to original TauLab project here the code : https://github.com/TauLabs/TauLabs

This is the VR Brain Patch

https://code.google.com/p/vrbrain/downloads/detail?name=VRBrain-Tau-Labs.rar&can=2&q=#makechanges

Now the FoxTeam start to check the code and fly it , if some one interest to alfa stage of testing is welcome :)

Thanks a lot for your work Stefan !!! :)

Original Blog Post :http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/not-only-arducopter32-on-vrbrain-now-is-available-also-taulab-pro

Wootwoot!

 They are here everyone!

That's a lot of techpods. I will start shipping tomorrow. Still have to work so the majority will be shipped Friday and Saturday when I will be having work parties with a few friend coming over for beer and pizza.

Thanks to the diydrones community for helping make this happen.

wayne

Diydrones Instagram Account - Click Here!

Drone Cafe News Homepage - Click Here

Drone Cafe Youtube Video Uploads

Hi All

I have just finished moving the design of the APM2.5v2 PCB to Altium AD13 and have attached it here. This will only work with the latest version of Altium (version 13)

the parts have been made into a library as well.

Please use the original EAGLE files as you primary reference, as I cannot be sure that I transferred everything correctly.

It has been a while but I am back at it . I made my first video the other day and with the help of Rainer Keller  and Chris Anderson  I finally figured out the path to post it on here to  show you guys. 

I Got a Midland XTC200 personal action cam strapped it to my Radian Pro and went flying . At my place on the farm there is a 150 foot cliff down to Lake Erie . The wind was blowing  30 knots up  over the cliff. (when you are eager to try something new,  sometimes reason takes the back seat !) I launched the plane,  about 100 feet up it caught the wind shear and was immediately blown 1/4 mile down wind."It was a Hand full"and I managed to land OK  right side up.

 Some of you guys might be wondering how my scratch built Aluminum air plane with the 32 EDF  turned out ? I assembled all the pieces and hung it from a rafter in the barn with the tail down and the nose up at full power it barely" hoovers " not  The performance I am looking for I want it to be able to climb straight up from stationary at half throttle . The Battery is way heavier than I had anticipated . (all you experienced guys can say "  Ha Ha I told You so!") My options are get a second EDF(make the same mistake twice) a Gas turbine or a 50cc Gas propeller engine . Meanwhile my radian pro is starting to show it's age I bought a Multiplex Easy Star a while back (box of foam) The radian is still flying down the road I am going to "Morph" The radian pro into the Multiplex  It is going to have an aluminum "Spine down the center joining the two haves together . You guys have a Great day!

A great post from Sabine at Robohub:

TED just released an excellent talk (screenshot above; embedding isn't working) by Michael Dickinson from the University of Washington about how flies fly.

For years now, roboticists and biologists have been working together to understand how natural and man-made systems fly. We actually organized a conference on that topic in 2007 called Flying Insects and Robots, where Dickinson was one of the keynote speakers. The questions that most often arise are “how do you build a machine that flies” and “how do you control the behavior of these flyers”?

To tackle the first question, Dickinson’s lab built the Dynamically-Scaled Flapping Robot, or Robofly. The video below shows its assembly, but you can see it in action in his TED talk. The robotic model had a 60 cm wingspan, could flap around 5 times a second, and was immersed in 2 tons of mineral oil. By measuring instantaneous forces and flow patterns, his lab was able to explore aerodynamics of flapping flight.

To answer the second question, his lab uses high-tech fly arenas (fly-o-rama, fly-o-vision and rock-n-roll arena) that control the visual surrounding of the fly and record behavioral and neuronal activity. Insight gathered from such experiments, for example on how flies use optic flow to navigate an environment, have inspired a large number of robotic systems. Optic flow can be understood as the speed at which an image moves on the surface of your eye. If you’re in a car, looking at a distant mountain, the image of the mountain will move very little on your retina. If you are about to slam into a wall, the image of the wall will expand very rapidly. Large optic flow can tell you that an object is close. Optic flow is interesting for robots because it only requires very simple sensors (see Centeye sensor below) and processing.

The lab where I worked before at EPFL had lots of examples of how simple flying robots could use optic flow for 3D obstacle avoidance. The video below shows a flying wing that uses optic flow sensors found in your typical computer mouse to avoid the ground and obstacles.

Finally, going back to biology, one of Dickinson’s recent papers explores the reaction of real flies to moving objects, in this case a fly-sized robot (flyatar). Results showed that, similar to interactions between pairs of flies, walking female flies freeze in response to objects that move from back-to-front, wherease they ignore objects that move from front-to-back.

Here is a small video of the setup showing a flyatar tracking a fly, or being controlled by a joystick:

You can check Michael Dickinson’s lab website for more fly related material.

I stumbled upon this... um... interesting video on Youtube.  Amazingly over 500,000 people have already watched it.  I think for the most part it's just some guys having fun with guns.  But it's another interesting insight into the growing fearmongering about domestic drones.

The statement that "The first person to shoot down a drone will be folk hero" is probably quite true I think.

For my Control Station project, I also started writing a bunch of decoding function for the FrSky telemetry protocol.

I have now moved those functions into their own library for Arduino. My focus while writing and expanding this library is on ease of use. There is already Arduino code available but I found that a bit complicated to integrate. With the new library, all the user needs to do, is read one char from the serial port and send it to the library via the ::update method. All the decoding is done internally. The ::update method returns 1 when a complete packet was received, otherwise it returns 0. There is (will be) a dedicated method to access every parameter. I'll also try to keep up the detailled documentation.

At the moment, the library decodes only the basic information, RX A1 & A2 ports, uplink and downlink RSSI. Additional sensors will be included as I receive the hardware (which hopefully is soon).

Find the library at GitHub.

Example use (on MEGA 2560):

#include <frsky.h>
FrSky frsky;
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial2.begin(9600);
}
void loop() {
  if (Serial2.available()) {
    char c = Serial2.read();
    if (frsky.update(c)) { 
      Serial.print("TX RSSI: ");
      Serial.println(frsky.getLink_up());
      Serial.print("Telemetry RSSI: ");
      Serial.println(frsky.getLink_dn());
      Serial.print("RX Voltage: ");
      Serial.println(frsky.getRX_a1()*0.0517647058824);
      Serial.print("A2 Voltage: ");
      Serial.println(frsky.getRX_a2()*0.0129411764706);
    }
  }
}

You may have noticed some slight design changes here over the past day, which are simply me band-aiding a situation where the external site that hosted some of our design files shut down, leaving a bunch of broken images and mangled CSS here. For now I've reverted to some native Ning design features and brought back an old header (above), but this strikes me as a good time to start the process of a proper redesign. 

In Spring, Ning (which we're hosted on) will roll out a bunch of new design and functionality features, which should improve things here considerably. It still won't perfect, especially for very long comment threads, so we're going to launch some new forums for product/software discussion/support on the new manual/wiki site that we'll be previewing in a few weeks. These new forums will be based on a very good WordPress forum plug-in, so they should be a big step up from what we've currently got. And by pushing product/technical support to a separate site, DIY Drones can focus more on its original function on news and discussion about civilian UAVs and technology in general. 

In the meantime, it's time to update our header. So I'd like to launch a competition for the best design. The winner will get an APM 2.5+.

Guidelines:

• Create a rectangular graphic (width 955 1,000 pixels, height anything from 100 to 200 pixels) that will replace the above. 
• The name should stay the same ("DIY Drones") but the tagline should change to "Amateur UAVs, Contests, Products and More" Revision: I've had advice to lead with "community", so let's try this: "The Leading Community for Amateur and Civilian UAVs" Another revision! After yet more advice, let's go with "The leading community for personal UAVs". You can use any style you think looks best (caps or lowercase).
• There should be some image of a UAV. Ideally, it should look cool and "drone-like" but not look military or threatening. Fixed wing or multicopter, it's up to you.
• Post your submissions in the comments below
• The competition will run one month, until March 23rd

Last time we did this, back in 2010, we got some great submissions. I'm looking forward to seeing what the design talent in this community can come up with this time!

Some time we need to work with metal parts. For example - motor mount.

Is a vibrationless motormount for MVVS 152 cc twin spark engine. I think it's possible made from wood, but aluminium look much better for me.

(copied from my blog at hobbyuav.com)

Hey everyone!

I have not found a place where the fixed-wing control for the PX4 is being done so I started this blog.

Above is a Screen shot from XFLR5. I use it to mathematically model the physical form of an airplane. I can then take this description of said plane and then start modeling the flow of air over the surfaces described is the model. You can then send modeled air at it in different angles and at different viscosity. In other words different pitches and yaws as well as different air densities or altitudes.

I use it all the time to make U.A.Vs. I think it should be integrated into the PX4 so that we can start introducing into the mathematical models of the control algorithms, a model of the crafts interaction with its environment (air).  Thus achieving a much more complete  mathematical description of the system.

This can be implemented by modeling the aicraft in XFLR5 then taking the results and generating LUTs of the predicted  air/air-frame interactions. just one example of this would be to use the generated full airplane polar graphs to predict what AOA at a given speed and air density, should produce level flight or even produce a desired vertical acceleration (climb or dive). This would greatly reduce the dependence on the PID loop to achieve a given altitude, making the system much more stable at a greater range of the aircrafts flight envelope.

This can also be applied to different control loops as well. yaw and roll control. It can also be applied to  every control surface as well. XFLR5 can generate tables of inertial moment data as well giving you a Cm polar. this can be calculated for various control surface angles. You can then  take the aerodynamic Cm data and combine it with a physical inertial model to do a full stability analysis. The output of the Cm and the inertial model data can then be feed in to the control loops to achieve desired rotational accelerations instead of purely relying on the PID loop. Giving the control loops a much wider dynamic range that is possible with just a PID loop.

I have a little blog about my experiences with quadcopters called OddCopter.com. I have been so impressed by the recent feature enhancements and popularity of the APM2.5+ platform that I wanted to track down Chris Anderson and see if he would do an interview for my blog. He graciously accepted and here are the results:

An Interview with Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics

I think the interview turned out great and contains some really interesting stuff. Please check it out if you get a chance.

I am fairly new to the DIYDrones community. I have only used the ArduCopter software via the MegaPiratesNG port running on a MultiWii Pro Board. I have a Naza, and when I had tried various open source projects in the past, the altitude hold feature didn't seem to measure up, However, I noticed the recent iterations MegaPiratesNG had huge improvements in Altitude Hold. I also setup and flew a few missions a while back. It was a little scary for me, but it worked great. This has gotten my really excited about getting the real thing and giving it a try! 

Britt

From Gizmag:

Earlier this month, we reported on the PowerUp 3.0 – a US$50 kit that lets you control a powered paper airplane via your smartphone. At the time, we were still waiting to hear back from its designer, regarding how a simple add-on motorized propeller could be used to actually steer the plane. Now we know.

To recap our previous article, the PowerUp 3.0 kit consists of a capacitor joined to a propeller by a carbon fiber shaft, that can be attached to a user-supplied folded paper airplane made from regular A4 or 8.5 x 11-inch copier paper. Using an iPhone equipped with Bluetooth 4.0 and PowerUp’s app, the user can then control the flight-path of that plane. But how?

As was suggested by some of our readers, the kit turns the plane via a small tail rudder, and climbs and descends via throttle control – this means that whenever it speeds up, it climbs, and whenever it slows down, it descends. According to creator Shai Goitein, the rudder is controlled simply by tipping the phone left or right.

“The really cool feature is the on-board accelerometer which gives the artificial horizon on the iPhone realtime airplane orientation, you can virtually fly it just by looking at your phone,” he added.

A PowerUp 3.0-enabled paper airplane can be seen in flight in the video below.

Great demo of how a very easy-to-use survey/mapping UAV works. It costs $20,000. 

Its been a while so lets try again. Had a hangout with Chris and we briefly spoke about the next T3 round. Chris will work on a top prize ;-)

The mission is simple, get airborne climb to 20m 

Fly a cube with 50m sides, pausing for one minute at each corner, so your flight time cannot be anything less than 8 minutes..... Bonus points if you can stay longer at each corner....

The neatest cube KML wins.

If you can do this with a 3D aircraft I feel you would have a very strong chance of winning!

I will close the competition on April the 14th. I will be looking at where you are flying very closely. Please don't try this in public places or within 500m of any building / road.