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Ok, many have followed my tribulations with 3.0.x and its compassmot requirement. My previously smooth flying quad had suddenly become almost unflyable. You can see my efforts to get a sensible compassmot reading in my previous post, but that was in vain - I still had toilet bowl issues, and all the auto modes were off limits.

So here is a summary of all the things I did once I got my external compass. Most will notice that it's the elevation/seperation that's had the most effect, but crucially, none of these involved airframe alteration. The only downside is my compass and GPS are no longer protected by the dome, and are very exposed if this flips....

Ok, the list.

1. Changed all my bolts to have the head at the top.

2. Moved all my components to put as much space between them as possible

3. Twisted my ESC power cables, and resoldered onto a new PDB.

4. External pylons were used for camera, GPS/compass, Video TX and ezOSD. quadframe.com frames only.

5. Some electronic components were moved underneath. eg light controller, ez Current sensor, BEC, 3DR PM.

6. *** I USED A DJI GPS ELEVATOR. I have selected the lowest pole which is about 7cm in height. I was going to test the others (12cm and 16cm respectively), but at 4%, I suspect my gains will be minimal! ***
(http://www.goodluckbuy.com/bracket-holder-set-for-dji-wkm-gps-autopilot-system.html)

7. *** I removed the foam padding on the legs! This prevented z-axis movement throwing off the results ***

8. The alexmos and RCtimer gimbal are now powered off the 3S circuit used for the APM/rx/gps, rather than it's own

9. Some risers replaced with nylon ones.

It should be noted that this was Throttle only; I'm on 6S for the main flight components, so no 3DR PM current sensing :(

Can't wait to go fly now...it's been so long! But it's raining!

Just wanted to share this article.

http://m.civilbeat.com/articles/2013/07/19/19508-drones-animal-blood-paris-hilton-and-monitoring-from-above/

I was contacted and asked some questions about drones. None of my answers were used. I guess the article could have been worse... But I just love how the general public assumes all drones are out to get them or that Predator UAVs don't have pilots in command of them...the list goes on.

There are some very legitimate privacy and safety issues of course...but a boyfriend using a uav to spy on his ex girlfriend?....arrrg.

It is just frustrating when UAVs have such great potential to do good, and many DIYdrones members are doing some incredible projects for the greater good, and then the news mostly reports on all of the far fetched negative aspects.

Anyways, I just wanted to share with the community and I hope future contacts with the media can really highlight all of the benefits of UAVs without succumbing to the "every drone is trying to spy on me" mentality. 

A short video I made using my MultiWii quad flying at my school today morning :) I'm 15, so any opinions are appreciated. Please watch in HD for best effect. Hope you enjoy!!!!!! Shot on a windy day,before a storm so I had fight with the controls a bit.

Setup :

• DIY frame with alu arms (TBS Disco style)
• Self-made Multiwii controller
• MultiStar  30A Opto ESCs
• 950kV Turnigy motors
• 10x 4.5 props
• 3S 4500mah LiPo
• HackHD camera
• 400mW 5.8Ghz FPV Tx
• Turnigy 9x with monitor

Please give your opinions  I fried my APM 2.5 due to freak BEC failure hence my move towards MultiWii temporarily. If anyone has a spare APM, and is willing to help me out, please let me know. 

Testing the octo without 1 of the top motors and then 1 of them bottom motors to check what's happens if a prop/motor/esc gets bad during flight.

Previously I've done the same test with a flat hexacopter and an Y6 but they didn't performed very well.

With a flat octocopter, if it looses 1 motor/esc/prop it's barely affected. I was flying my octo and it lost a blade of a prop but I just noticed after I landed.

A few months ago, I started a project for an integrated groundstation. The idea was to combine Arduino, MAVLink, FrSky and a good TX system (Sky9x board) into an integrated system to control any kind of UxV. After making good progress, the project stalled because I'm waiting for documentation and samples from FrSky and after the FrSky Taranis and the Turnigy 9XR came out, both the Sky9X and the gruvin9x boards were discontinued.

Then came school for me and lots of stuff...

Recently I started hacking the external mode switch panel which I just posted about. After reading the comments and feedback on that, I started thinking again and decided to go back to the groundstation project. As I am now a little bit more clever - I know how to generate a PPM stream, which always was the biggest obstacle for me - I decided to start making everything - a real integrated system, based on an Arduino Mega.

Why Arduino? Well, I want the system to be easily hackable. The whole system will be easy to DIY. I will refrain from using special PCBs as much as possible. And of course, everything will be open source.

For the special "cool touch", I am also designing avionics-style panels. I even found a company in Spain which is interested in that project and will make those panels for a good price.

But of course, the most important part is functionality. Here are a few initial points.

• Modular - as much as possible stuff will be put into modules to easily select what we want
• Basic control goes via RC TX (JR style modules), simply because there's lots of robust solutions on the market - solutions which also have communication authority approvals!
• No bells and whistles in the RC part. No expos, wild mixes, etc. The sticks are to tell the APM what to do and the APM does the stuff. There will be a very small number of RC functions, like a switch to put the elevator a few degrees up for hand-launch and similar
• No touchscreens, no colorful LCDs, etc.! Why? Because those stuff is either not sunlight-readable or idiotically expensive. We will have some modules with 1 or 2 line STN displays, but that's it.
• Panel will be designed close to avionics standards. The main goal is to keep it intuitive and to help people keep the overview. I might even adapt some mechanical (simulator) gauges or create some myself.

This being said, I kick the ball in the community's corner. What do YOU think would be a useful function / a useful module for the perfect UAS-TX? Please comment, but keep it realistic!

It's customary and a tradition that we celebrate every new 1,000 members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 42,000!!!!

There were 1.7 million page views in the last month! (we get around 57,000 pageviews a day on average). It took us just 26 days to get this latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 37 minutes.

Thanks as always to all the community members who make this growth possible, and especially the moderators who approve blog posts and otherwise answer questions and keep things ticking here.

Regards,

TCIII Admin

This was the biggest test so far for my 'low vibration' quadcopter. The quarry was surrounded by professional film crews so it was with some trepidation that I took to the air in 15kts of gusty wind.

The intention was to 'park' the copter in the correct position and then concentrate on camera angle but for some reason the well tested loiter didn't hold position and got blown downwind. I suspect it was just the strength of the wind or possibly  the compass getting affected by the towers. There is some indication in the tlog of 30deg shift in compass at that moment. Anyway it was all flown in STAB.

I was using a gopro 3 black on a rctimer BG.

copter build is blogged HERE.

The new small size UAS Skyhooks 1700 UAV 

It's made in strong white EPO foam just like most hobby models these days.

Wingspan: 1718mm
Body length: 1100mm
Wing Area: 45.5dm2

Empty Weight: 1050g
Material: EPO Foam design
0.2-0.3:1 Thrust to weight ratio.

Easy to assemble and disassemble.

Easy to transport.

This plane carrying 4s battery the take off weight is only 2.4KG if installing full line of FPV equipment take off weight is roughly 3KG.

When flown properly this plane can have more than one hour of flight time.

SKYhooks 1700 UAV

What you get:

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.

Not sure if anyone has seen this before... saw it by coincidence today...

They have 2 interesting models md4-1000 and md4-3000

50km range, 88 minutes flight!

Check this out!

http://microdrones.com/company/media-relations/press-releases/microdrones-unveils-the-new-microdrone-md4-3000.php

Some video I shot yesterday flying around the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton. This video is the start of the reason I got into multi-rotors years ago. Capturing smooth aerial video.

Shot with NO post stabilization or in-camera stabilization. Footage slowed from 60p to 24p. InfinityM brushless gimbal on a Droidworx AD6 frame with XM extended landing gear and quick release rails. Using Alexmos gimbal controller running 2.1 firmware. Filmed with a Sony NEX-7 and SELP 16-50mm lens.

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

Specs of the copter are as follows:

Frame designed by me and CNC'd from G10 (600mm MTM)

Sunnysky V2216-11 (800Kv)

Turnigy Plush 25a ESC's

Graupner 10*5 propellers

Paris V4.0 with an eBay IMU (L3G4200D+ADXL345+BMP085+HMC5883L) and MultiWiiCopter.com GPS

DragonLink V1

GoPro Hero2 mounted on earplugs

PZ0420 from Securitycamera2000

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.

It has been a long time since the last version, but an update (0.11.4) is on Google Play. The wider period between releases is just because we started to do alpha releases. This way the updates are bigger, but more stable. So let's see what is new!

The update

Its a big update, so what I think is most meaningful is in bold. The new version has the following updates ( v0.11.4 over v0.9.1):

Droidplanner v0.11.4

• Compatible with ArduRover
• Dynamicaly allocated on-screen joysticks

Droidplanner v0.11.3

• Preferences for the RC screen (Mode1/Mode2, Inverted Channel, QuickButtons)

Droidplanner v0.11.2

• Improving the Chart Screen
• Chinese Translation

Droidplanner v0.11.1

• Changing the start screen back to Flight Data

Droidplanner v0.11.0

• New Chart screen
• HUD code clean-up
• Activity's clean-up
• All markers are using the markerManager
• Colorful markers in the planning screen

Droidplanner v0.10.3

• Improved Record-Me mode (with a bug fix)
• Now all the data on a Mission item is used
• Better handling of the markers on GCP and Planning screens

Droidplanner v0.10.2

• Better swipe implementation on RC screen
• Bug fix on the RC screen
• Code Re-factoring

Droidplanner v0.10.1

• Fix in Offline maps
• New RC screen in portrait mode

Droidplanner v0.10.0

• More advanced waypoint editor

Droidplanner v0.9.3

• Fix problem in the build process

Droidplanner v0.9.2

• Big code refactoring
• Nicer RC screen
• French Translation
• Updating to the new Google Maps API
• Orientation lock when connected

Compatible with ArduRover

Support for ArduRover has been included. It show a nice icon and all the ArduRover modes. ( Thanks Tridge for helping me to setup the SILT simulator).

Dynamically allocated on-screen joysticks

This one is the result of a discussion on the dev-forum of diydrones about the On-screen joysticks. Now the joysticks are positioned under your finger when you press on the screen, the blue circle shows when the RC control will be saturated. This makes it easier to fly with the RC screen without having to think too much where your fingers are. Feedback on this feature is very important since this is something that can be change a lot between users.

Thanks John Wiseman for the link you pushed to the dev-forum.

Preferences for the RC screen (Mode1/Mode2, Inverted Channel, QuickButtons)

This one is just a complement for people that like to fly in Mode1 RC controllers, or for anyone who wants to invert the joysticks direction. As you can see in the picture above also quick flight mode buttons have been added to the RC screen, they are also configurable via the settings menu.

New Chart screen

A screen where you can plot some variables of your autopilot.

Better swipe implementation on RC screen

Just switch your device to portrait orientation in the RC screen. What you will get is a screen where you can use the RC sticks on the lower bottom, and have a HUD/map on the top. To switch between map and HUD just swipe the screen on the top, note that when you are on the map you have to swipe from the corner (it is this way so you can still do your normal gestures in the map, like panning, rotating and zooming).

More advanced waypoint editor

There has been an improvement in the planning screen. Now we have a new waypoint editor, it support other types of waypoints (although we haven't figured a good way to add the parameters in the UI, feel free to help). We hope to improve this a lot so it's very easy to create missions when you are in the field.

More info

For more information I suggest the DroidPlanner Wiki page. And if you just want to know how to connect your APM board, or what android device you can use just follow the links. 

And as always if you want to help consider donating for the project by buying this app, joining the development team, or reporting a issue/bug/improvement on GitHub.

People are often amazed at how lightweight and strong our 3D printed Nylon plastic can be with the correct geometry.  It is an important part of the design process to test your 3D printed designs to breaking point.  Prototyping a product before releasing it for sale to others in your Shapeways shop is essential to ensure that your design will stand up to the stresses of use, and not make your customers find out for you.

"People keep asking me, how strong is that printed chassis. My answer usualy was.."uuhhmm pretty strong I think"

Following is a video by Martin of Magic's Models on his VRCP channel on YouTube that tests hisWild Willy chassis for losi mrc remote control car 3D printed in Nylon by Shapeways.