Hello community!

The beauty of open source is that if you don't like something, you can change it. So here I am showing you my last changes to both: Mission Planner and ArduCopter (in the future it could be moved to library to be used by all Ardu* projects).

Before I start I would like to gather all threads about the subject that encouraged me to make all those changes:

* U4eake's showleds, arming and low battery warning leds

* Copter LEDS with APM2?

* 3,2,1... Blink !!!

* Adding External LED Indicators and a Piezo Beeper for Arm and GPS Status

* GPS Fix external led

* Navigation Lights with digital RGB LEDs together with an APM 2.5

* LED stripe setup

* jD-IOBoard

So of course there is jD-IOBoard for $16.00 but we are in DIY community and as we can see in above threads many of us prefer simpler and much cheaper solution (like 8x Darlington for less than $1). So IOBoard is ready out of the box solution but there is still demand on some hacky stuff and this is to address that.

There are 2 main areas that the new tab is trying to cover:

1) beeper

2) LEDs

Of course one could attach other elements like relays to those pins but I'll stick to default version.

So LEDs part is nothing new (yet). It's just user interface to already existing LED_MODE variable that you can alter via Advanced parameters tab. Instead of calculating bitmask you can now use simple checkboxes. However, I introduced LED_STYLE variable (combobox) to allow me adding more fancy LED behavior leaving "Legacy" one as backward compatible with the current version. This is still work-in-progress.

The brand new stuff is beeper part. Currently the beeper is controlled by one bit in LED bitmask enabling or disabling its functionality. With my changes we now have BEEPER_MODE bitmask with 8 functions (I already have idea for 9th one - failsafe - but it will require 2 bytes for the bitfield so it's postponed for now). You can see those 8 features on the attached screen - should be self explanatory. Selecting beeper pin should be possible with incoming changes to the code - for now it's disabled and it's hardcoded as AN5.

Every feature has different beep pattern and I tried to keep them quick but recognizable. The code is no longer using delay() function which is very bad (freezing uC code is not what we want it such application).

The changes are still in my branch and we'll see if dev will merge it into trunk to be available for all. If you are willing to test it you will have to grab it from here and flash APM (tested only on APM2 so far) as it adds variables in EEPROM. New Mission Planner is also there.

In the future plans there are other LED styles allowing more flexible LED behaviors. Any suggestions are welcomed.

Hope you like it.

Just spent a couple of hours getting my head around the MultiWii V2.1 serial protocol.  This involved looking at EOSBandi's MW-WinGUI Visual Studio c# code and adapting the essential bits I need to a simple test VB 2010 app.  The app sends the commands to get the GPS bearing and distance to home as well as the Baro altitude.  The BT module connected to the Pairs MultiWii board sends back the info I requested and shows these values in textboxes on a basic form.

That's part one out of the way.

Next phase will be adapting that code, now that I understand how it is done, to Arduino code.

The code will output PWM on two digital ports to drive two servo's to position the patch antenna.  Rather than use the short range BT module I will set the MultiWii code to use 57600 rather than 115200 and hook up my XBee Pro module.  The other XBee will be connected to the Arduino tracker.  So the tracking Arduino will be asking the Hexacopter where it is and with any luck the Hexacopter will say "here I am".

If anyone is a VB programmer I can post the important bits here if they want to roll their own PC based MultiWii ground station.  Very easy to code once you know the binary protocol.

If I get the Arduino code happening in the next few days I'll post it here.

Also, if anyone is aware of an existing tracker for the MultiWii controller which uses the V2.1 protocol (not via OSD's fitted with GPS's and telemetry sent via audio) please let me know about it.  

Watch this transformer on YouTube

From Gizmag:

A team at the Robotics Lab at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has come up with another take on the caged flying robots like the spherical air vehicle developed by Japan’s Ministry of Defense (JMD) and the more recent Kyosho Space Ball. However, instead of a spherical shape, the the outer protective cage of the HyTAQ (Hybrid Terrestrial and Aerial Quadrotor) is cylindrical and is attached to the quadrotor via a shaft connected by two rotating joints, thereby providing the HyTAQ with the ability to fly or roll over the ground.

With the quadrotors providing thrust for both aerial and terrestrial locomotion, there's no requirement for additional actuators that would increase the weight of the system. When on the ground, the rolling cage means the robot only needs to overcome rolling resistance to move forward, and when it encounters an obstacle to difficult to roll over, it can simply take to the air to jump over it.

The developers say the robot’s hybrid nature makes it much more energy efficient than aerial-only systems, with the ability to operate almost six times as long and travel a distance four times greater than such systems. Experiments conducted by the team showed that for aerial-only travel, its battery lasted five minutes and it traveled 1,969 ft (600 m), but rolling over a smooth surface saw its endurance extend to 27 minutes and the distance traveled increase to 7,874 ft (2,400 m).

The cage itself is constructed out of polycarbonate and carbon fiber making it both flexible and strong enough to withstand crashing. The development team has tested the HyTAQ’s ground performance over various types of terrain, including flat indoor surfaces and sand and grass outdoors. The ground locomotion capabilities also allow the robot to move when it’s too windy for flight.

Like its spherical kin, the reconnaissance and search and rescue potential of the camera-equipped robot are obvious and the team is now in the process of patenting the design and hopes to attract commercial interest.

The HyTAQ robot can be seen in action in the following video.

Happen to run across this today.  Great interview and a look at the workshop! 

http://lifehacker.com/5963966/im-chris-anderson-and-this-is-how-i-work

As a dad, this is the kind of thing I can get behind. A Kickstarter project for an iPad (and eventually other platforms) game to teach the principles of aeronautics through simulating bird flight. Called AERO, you can get a copy of the game when it's done for a $10 contribution. 

From the listing:

Seeing a plane or bird in soar in the sky is amazing to behold. But the aerodynamics and physics behind the miracle of flight are difficult to grasp. There are several forces engaged when a bird or plane flies, and here on earth we're unable to see any of them. But never fear!  Bill Nye andGameDesk have a revolutionary idea! With your help we can complete a game that teaches the physics behind flight by allowing players to literally become a bird and experience those scientific principles in their own hands. 

Yesterday HK released a video about their new 433Mhz LRS modules.
And i shocked. Because it is unauthorized copy of my OpenLRS !

OpenLRS is an Opensource RC and i'm the developer of that system.

Stop the video on 1:08 and check the receiver.
And check the pinout or something. http://www.flytron.com/openlrs/146-openlrs-receiver-v2.html

Only the difference is 6 pin ICSP. We don't need that because of our production procedure.

Now the question is "What can i do?"
If i cant find an answer about that, i will stop to designing open source hardware.

If you're thinking of competing in this weekend's Drone Olympics in San Francisco, this tutorial will come in handy. Or even better, replace the AR.Drone's closed-source controller with the open source PX4, and make a real drone!

From Hackaday:

[Max Ogden] wanted the option to add sensors to his Parrot AR Drone. This a commercially available quadcopter which runs Linux. This makes it rather easy for him to use Node.js to read the sensors from an Arduino board. The use of the Arduino is merely for easy prototyping. It is only needed to bridge the drone’s serial port with a sensor’s delivery method, so just about any microcontroller could be substituted for it.

There are some hardware considerations to take into account. The manufacturer was nice enough to populate a 0.1″ pitch pin socket on the serial port (if only this kind of invitation to mess with hardware was an industry standard). But the device expects 3.3V levels so pick your hardware accordingly. There is one commenter who tried the project for themselves and found that the drone wouldn’t boot up with the Arduino already connect — he had to boot and then complete connections. Troubles aside this makes adding your own sensor payload very simple and you don’t have to wait until landing to get at the data.

ArsTechnica has a good primer on UAV control theory and machine learning. The good stuff starts around page 2. Here's an excerpt (citing this Stanford research):

The helicopter is performing an entire airshow sequence, but the flights in the video are completely automated! As the helicopter flies through the various maneuvers, the computer has to deal with all kinds of complicated aerodynamics and aero-elastic effects. The rotor blades flex and twist and the helicopter has to fly through turbulence generated by its own rotor. These things are hard to measure and almost impossible to model mathematically with accuracy.

Given how nasty the aerodynamics get, the Stanford researchers couldn’t design the controller the same way as the quadrotor designs we talked about above. Instead, the Stanford team turned to the best authority they could find on helicopter flight: a skilled human radio-control (RC) pilot. They had the helicopter learn to fly by watching the pilot and flying itself using machine learning.

Again, there were two parts to this process, low-level control, and high-level trajectory generation. The researchers needed control algorithms that could keep the helicopter stable and in control during the kind of extreme flights they wanted to perform. They also had to come up with some way to represent the sequence airshow maneuvers to fly.

For the control algorithms, the team used a technique known as reinforcement learning, or RL. They started by recording the position, orientation, and speed of the helicopter, plus control data like joystick and throttle positions from a skilled human pilot. Then they took a basic model of the helicopter in simulation and paired it with a basic control algorithm, and simulated the flights thousands of times. Each time, the computer adjusted the model and the control algorithms to try to get the simulated angles and speeds closer to the real flight from the human pilot. By running the flights in simulation but with real data, they were able to learn a control algorithm that could fly helicopter at the extreme conditions for the aerobatics, as well as a model for how the helicopter behaves in those conditions.

Now, to get the helicopter to perform the extreme maneuvers shown in the video, the research team also had to specify the angles and positions of the helicopter (just like the paths generated for the quadrotors before. But this turns out to be quite complicated).

During these flights, the helicopter is performing in a highly nonlinear way. This is engineer-speak for being very unpredictable: as the helicopter spins and pirouettes, it flies through its own prop wash and turns through large angles. In this case, the aerodynamics get so complicated that it’s impossible to do what we talked about before: picking out desired intermediate points and having the computer simply connect the dots. If the helicopter doesn’t exit one maneuver with the right speed and orientation, it won’t be able to complete the next one. The whole sequence is an intricate, interdependent chain.

To get around this, the Stanford team again turned to their human expert pilot. They had the pilot take the helicopter through the entire airshow routine again and again, giving the helicopter a set of examples. However, this was just the start. The human pilot isn’t perfect; every performance differs slightly from the others. Sometimes turns are cut a little short, or a flip is faster than the pilot might have wanted. But each flight has thousands of data points, each with different angles and positions. So how do you know which part of each routine is correct?

In this case, you can’t combine the trajectories and try to average out the error. Some maneuvers were performed slightly faster or slower, and it’s almost impossible to line things up. Simply cutting and pasting different maneuvers and stunts from different flights get nonsensical results: the start of a flip may depend on the speed coming out of the loop before, and the slightest error means the difference between a completed maneuver and a crash. You can’t simply take a flip from one flight and a loop from another and just hope they work together.

Hi guys,

Please find hereafter some very usefull links for "Succesful PCB grounding". I think it is a very good "know how" on how to design groung paths on your PCBs.

PART1: http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4394761/Successful-PCB-grounding-with-mixed-signal-chips---Part-1--Principles-of-current-flow

PART2: http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4395817/Successful-PCB-grounding-with-mixed-signal-chips---Part-2--Design-to-minimize-signal-path-crosstalk

PART3: http://www.edn.com/design/analog/4396382/Successful-PCB-grounding-with-mixed-signal-chips---Part-3--Power-currents-and-multiple-mixed-signal-ICs

Best regards

Nick Arsov

From Gawker:

TMZ today responded to a widely circulated report recently published in the San Francisco Chronicle claiming the gossip site was among the myriad public and private entities flooding the Federal Aviation Administration with applications for their own private drones.

"TMZ is NOT getting in the DRONE business," the website exclaimed in its statement. "We don't have a drone; we don't want a drone; we never applied for a drone; despite a bogus report to the contrary."

According to the Chronicle story, which was linked to earlier today by Drudge, a rush by the government to allow domestic use of drones has resulted in the FAA being inundated with applications "from police departments, universities, private corporations and even the celebrity gossip site TMZ."

"Truth is," TMZ says, "while drones are, in fact, awesome, it just ain't true."

Today's installment of Make Magazine's great geek gift guide is on aerial drones. Lots of ArduCopter/Plane/Pilot in there, along with accessories and cheap options of the budget-conscious. 

There is not a great selection of decent 3 axis camera mounts for gopro sized cameras so I have started building my own. The first one will be a ‘nose mount’ and I may later consider a belly mount for quads etc. It will have one standard sized digital servo for roll and 2 micro sized ones. The belt drive gearing is to increase the rotation angle up to 280deg. All pivots will have deep groove ball bearings.

I hope to mould a thin carbon fibre cover for rain protection (it hasn’t stopped here for 6 months).

This will fit on the nose of the Holden UAV, which has now had many successful flights with an APM2. More of that

 HERE

Microsoft and Arduino are normally worlds apart but on Friday of last week, ArduPlane was used as an example on "Channel 9". You can read the full article here

Today's Hardware Friday post. Oh yeah, that's some goodness...

Channel 9 is a Microsoft Blog

Drone article in January 2013 issue of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine.  Lots of application info in this one.

Click HERE to read article.

I have just finished building a Multiplex Funjet. I have added the APM 2 in the Funjet.

The motor is a 2830 4000KV with a 40 A ESC.

6x4 prop

I am looking for any suggestions on setting up the PID’s. I see the Skyjet’s para file is in the download area.

Will this work on the Funjet ?

I would like to have the APM working nice before maddening the Funjet, because I know it is very fast.

One of the things I get asked most often about by the press is for examples of non-military, non-police use of drones. Part of our function here at DIY Drones is to educate the public about civilian and peaceful uses of drones, so I'm always happy to reel off some examples, from agriculture to Hollywood (aside from the main reason we do it here, which is education and fun).  Atmel has also created a great list of "18 ways that drones are being used today", which illuminates how broad their non-military applications are.  

But to make it easier to get the word out, I've started a repository of such uses, below. I'll link to this post from the front page of DIY Drones. Please add your own examples and suggestions (including categories I may have missed) in the comments, and I'll update the post to include them as they come in.

Examples of Non-Military, Non-Police use of Drones

Agriculture

• BBC video
• In Australia
• Ohio State

Search and Rescue

• Inside Science video
• Colorado case study
• Academic research

Hollywood

• New York Times article
• Fast Company article
• A Maserati commercial filmed by drones

Sports

• CBS News
• Drone filming action sports (wakeboarding)
• Drone filming mountain climbing

Wildlife management

• Studying crane nesting
• Tracking elephants
• Ocean wildlife
• Stopping poachers
• Tracking Orangutans in Sumatra

Science/Environment

• Plant biology
• Hurricane tracking
• Multispectral imaging of Florida Keys
• Tracking ocean debris
• Atmospheric research
• Academic research
• Journal of Remote Sensing special report
• Mapping archeological ruins, also here. 

News reporting

• The Drone Journalism Lab
• DroneJournalism.org
• Washington Post
• New York Times

Real Estate

• New York Times
• FAA warning that it’s not legal yet
• Networked Realtor

Mapping

• Companies investing in this space
• A company offering the service
• Google Maps blog

Delivering Medicine

• Matternet (company doing this)
• Gizmodo
• Gates Foundation funding

Human Rights Monitoring

• New York Times
• Proposed use by the UN
• Finding warlords in Sudan

Communications networks

• For post-disaster communications resumption
• Flying cell sites
• Wifi hotspots

And lots more in the comments below and at the DC Area Drone User group

From the Spring 2013 Course Schedule of New York University's ITP program:

Flying Robots

 

Flying robots, aka Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, are growing in number and influence in military use. In parallel, the hobbyist community is developing DIY methods, making flying robots more accessible to more people. What is yet to become common is for these DIY aircraft to carry out visions rather than simply take pictures. This course aims to provide the conceptual and technical foundation for using flying robots for visionary purposes. Here, technology is the tool. The air vehicle is the paintbrush, the poster, the camera; visible to some degree but not the purpose. The first step is to strip down the employment of a flying robot to its essence, as a means to gather information or take action at a distance, using an autonomous agent. The group will discuss and expand the current thinking on feasible, worthy objectives for flying robots, from art to science, from observation to communication, from performance to activism. Throughout the course, these conceptual topics will be a backdrop for hands-on projects using accessible technology. 

The projects will investigate:

• Performing a task with a flying robot
• Moving information and decision-making
• Making a craft fly autonomously

The projects will be performed in small teams and will require conceptualization, system design, and mechanical, electrical and coding work. The types of small aircraft could include quadcopters, blimps, planes, or less conventional platforms. Flight controls will be done using the Arduino-based ArduPlane and ArduCopter, or other embedded computing platforms. The online DIY/hobbyist community will be used as a resource. Each week, class will include a brief lecture and discussion followed by demonstration and debugging of projects.

From Gizmag. Autolanding is easy with multicopters using ultrasound, but hard with planes, since ultrasound is too noisy. Maybe radar would be better?

Excerpt from the article:

Research based in Frankfurt, Germany, and funded by the European Union, has resulted in a new low-cost, fingernail-sized radar chip package that could be implemented in a variety of areas, including the automotive industry, robotics and smartphones.

The chip was developed under the “Silicon-based ultra-compact cost-efficient system design for mm-wave sensors” (or Success) consortium, and is believed to be the smallest complete silicon-based system-on-chip (SoC) device for radar able to operate at frequencies beyond 100 GHz.

“As far as I know, this is the smallest complete radar system in the world,” said Professor Christoph Scheytt, coordinator of the project on behalf of IHP Microelectronics in Frankfurt, Germany. “There are other chips working at frequencies beyond 100 GHz addressing radar sensing, but this is the highest level of integration that has ever been achieved in silicon.”

The chip package measures 8 x 8 mm (0.3 x 0.3 inches), operates at 120 GHz, and can calculate the distance of an object up to around 3 meters (10 feet) away, to an accuracy of within 1 mm. It can also detect moving objects, and their velocity, by using the Doppler effect.

From Wired Design, a story of a group of protesters who were able to buy a used Predator carrying container for $300 and turned it art piece to protest drones. Also, check out the picture at the bottom: similar UAV containers were used as props in the Avengers!

“He told me it would make a great koi pond,” said James Enos, recalling the dealer in obscure military surplus who did business, along with his dog, in one of the weedy fields around Ramona, California.

“It” was the original logistical container of an MQ-1 Predator Drone Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — the most prominent model of drone aircraft that is waging remote-controlled war on suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.

“He was a nice guy,” Enos remembered of the dealer who had posted the unusual offering on Craigslist, but was close-lipped about its origin in the murky military surplus community around San Diego. “All he would say was he got it at the port.”

The koi pond idea wasn’t a bad one, but Enos had other plans for the 27-foot-long fiberglass container with a hinged lid. The sides of the object still wore stickers announcing its original price — almost $18,000 — as well as its overseas destination and even the name of the U.S. military officer who took delivery of it in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The dealer wanted $300.

“I was always looking for large things,” said Enos, who said that he first figured the box would make good building material. As a co-director of The Periscope Project, an experimental architecture and design cooperative in San Diego, he was constantly in need of salvageable items to use in construction projects. He knew that a fiberglass object that large, vacuum-formed in the manner of a hot tub, had likely cost thousands of dollars to make. “I had to have it,” he said.

But Enos soon realized he had a bona fide readymade on his hands. The huge beige container was a powerful object, one that touched many worlds: the drone war, throwaway culture, the American military-industrial complex and its hold on San Diego, a city whose economy is driven by a weird blend of sunny-California tourism and lucrative government defense contracts.

It also symbolized the controversial, covert military strikes that the presidential candidates have been talking about (and, notably, not talking about) in the run-up to the election. Drones barely came up in the debates — Romney said, briefly, that he supported the President’s use of them — but they have become one of the most singular aspects of foreign policy under this administration, and there’s no sign that aggressive drone strikes will stop, no matter who wins the election on Tuesday.

Enos and his Periscope Project colleagues decided to turn the drone casing into a “threadbare mobile dwelling unit,” adding a reference to downtown San Diego’s housing crisis to its other layers of significance. (“Homeless people say to us, ‘I want to live in one of these. Is this a FEMA program?’” Enos told me.)

They took the container back to Periscope headquarters in a U-Haul truck and got to work. The first step was to take it apart. It swung open at the top; inside was a formed and padded tray that once cradled the drone precisely, and which Enos and team later turned into a bench.

“It had desiccant bags, like you get when you buy a pair of shoes, the size of loaves of bread,” Enos said.

Carefully, Enos and a handful of skilled volunteers installed fans in either end of the case, scraped out glue, and put in wooden platform floors and carpeting. They added built-in shelving and wired the unit for electricity. They cut the hinged lid so that the center part of the container can be propped open to the sky. Furnished this way, the drone “coffin” is like a camper without a motor (it still rolls on the ten-inch casters it came with). Working with found parts and donated labor, the team completed the conversion for under $1,000.

[Read more here]

“Hidden in plain sight”: crates of MQ-1 Predator drones, with orange plastic lids to spare the fiberglass, stacked up in a still from Joss Whedon’s 2012 superhero movie, The Avengers.