Blogs

The new app (v0.9.1) is on Google Play. One nice new feature is the Record-Me.

The update

The new version has the following updates ( v0.9.1 over v0.9.0):

• Record-Me mode

• Nicer Icons

• Portuguese Translation

• Improvements to the HUD

• Change the default alt. to 50m

• Option to select diferent baud rates

• Option to keep the screen at full brightness

• Fix a bug with the Volume Control

• Fix bug in the RC Override screen

Record-Me

This is an interesting feature, you record a path and make you UAV follow it (J-DeMarco). I'll describe how it works:

1. Enable GPS on your Android Device
2. Go to the planning screen
3. Click on RECORD
4. Walk around (it will record a waypoint every 2s)
5. Hit RECORD again, it should say "file saved"

Now you have just created a file with the path you just walked, if you want load up the file and push it to your ArduPilot board and make your drone fly it. The image at the top of the post was made using this mode by taking a ride around my neighborhood.

How was it done

One nice thing with this version is that it is all done on top of the community work, I just did some review, re-factoring to keep-up the code base clean, testing, and merging. Here are some stats on the work we did from the last version:

6 authors have pushed 45 commits to all branches, excluding merges. On master, 24 files have changed and there have been 864 additions and 339 deletions. For more info go here.

For more information I suggest the DroidPlanner Wiki page. 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.

Here's a preview of the "D" page of Adafruit's next Maker coloring book (current one here).  Thanks PT!

It's customary and a tradition that we celebrate every new 1,000 members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 41,000!!!!

There were 1.5 million page views in the last month! (we get around 50,000 pageviews a day on average). It took us just 23 days to get this latest 1,000 members--we're averaging one new member every 33 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

I am planning to use the RVOSD current sensor to measure the voltage and current of my system. Everybody knows that the power module from ardupilot is not compatible with 6s batteries. What I feel sorry. So i am interested to use the current sensor from a rvosd because is a really good one and can handle high voltage batteries. I will feed the APM with BEC, or will be even better if I can do both, power up APM and measure the batteries with the rvosd current sensor.Any ideas how to do it?

On Thursday July 18,2013 we are going to launch another balloon (2nd this year).

This time we are going to fly a PX4FPU and PX4IO board.

Along with our other stuff.

430 Mhz 3DR telemetry

900 Mhz 3DR telemetry

2 Byonics APRS tracking units. 10 watt output. See live track on APRS.FI and search for KE5VSH

Voltage, inside and outside temp sensors, output on APRS.FI

Live 1.5 watt video on 1.2 Ghz. Side outside view.

2 Muvie recording cameras. One pointed up the other down.

1 GoPro Hero 2 pointed to the side.

1 120 db sonaleart for location on recovery.

6 various size lipo batteries. 1000mwh to 6400 mwh

Fiberglass package made by our crew. Inside insulated with 1/2" foam.

BTW....can you believe I get PAID to do this ? (Student intern)

Package weighs about 9 lbs.

Balloon is 1500 gram. Filled with 2 big tanks of helium.

Here are some pics:

7/3/2013 balloon launch equipment

Some of the NEW 7/18/2013 launch equipment. Includes PX4IO and PX

More pics of 7/18/2013 launch equipment:

I hope you enjoy the pics.

We will see if the PX4 holds up as well as the APM's that have flown before. Temps range from 90 F to 33 F inside and 90 F to -70 F outside. The balloon speed gets as high 107 mph on the last flight in the jetstream at ~ 35,000 ft. We have recovered all flight packages (11) so far. Hope to on this also.

Report after launch...and look on APRS.FI on 7/18/13.

Earl

As reported by TagesAnzeiger.ch:

A 41 year old male was found with heavy injuries to head and arms by a walker in Mauensee Luzern Switzerland. The helicopter of type Gaui Formula X7 was found next to the body and collected as evidence by the police.

Its T3 time again but first I have started tagging people that have entered T3 in the past on their member icons its a very small recognition for their valuable contributions which have driven APM forward faster than it might have without the competition. They have not only put their equipment on the line discovering new ways of doing things but countless hours as well.

Unsung heroes in the development of low cost autopilots for all.

So lets get into this round.

I waste far too much time on the most excellent GEFS there could be more 3D buildings laid on top of the Google Earth base layer. Lets change that.

The last T3 challenge "The Cube" bought some really outstanding results and the natural progression from this is automated flight around a building or natural point of interest and the creation of a 3D model perhaps in 123D catch of the subject. Last November Alan Sanchez showed us how. Improvements in the multirotor code that came into play at the Sparkfun AVC will help with the flying.

This could be achieved with a fixed wing platform with a little thought.

We should have some ground rules (pun intended) you must seek permission to make a model of the building, or natural wonder! You should fly no higher than 130m and the flight should be hands off all the way and you should stay visual with the airframe at all times. Please do not create a model of something in class A airspace unless it's at a recognized model aircraft field.

The flight must be at very least autonomous from just after take off to just before landing. If you can do it all autonomously bonus points! FPV entries will not be permitted.

If you submit your model to Google Earth and get it placed bonus points when it appears on GEFS for me to fly around it. In this case the model might be skinned with images taken from the air.

This is no simple task so it should remain open for six months. Normally I tack time on at the end so to break with tradition lets start the competition on the 1st of August and run all the way to 1st Feb 2014! That gives folks the extension weeks in advance!

Prizes to be announced when I have finished twisting CA's arm. As we know he always comes good.
I am also putting out a call for volunteer judges from the ranks of previous T3 entrants to help me decide. This one is I think going to be very subjective and how attempts are documented is going to be a big factor. 

There is no doubt automated building inspection will be a part of the future for sUAS.

Good Luck, be safe

GM

Now let the traditional but did you mean XYZ questions begin! Oh and if you are tooling around on GEFS as well look out for me as Gary sUAS News, often slope soaring ;-)

In my past blog post "Tinkering with Neopixel LED-strips" and "Control high power LEDs (1W, 3W) from the APM 2.5 LED output", I have described a bit how to work with WS2812 Neopixel RGB lightstrips and how to control high-power LEDs with the APM. Yesterday night was the first latenight test flight with the installed system. The brightness of the Neopixel modules I made (3 LEDs each plus an 8 LED "360° beacon" on top of the copter) is pretty nice. At the front is a blue 3W LED (run by only a 1W driver to conserve energy and keep the heat in check) with a Flare lens from LEDIL. The flare lens has a very narrow vertical but a wide horizontal divergence. I mounted it turned 90° to serve as an indicator if the copter is heading straight towards me. Normally, the LED-driver's modulation input is connected to the APM's GPS LED output but for this test, I connected it to my light. controller.

If somebody feels the need to complain about safety because of me walking/flying on the road... I live in a residential area at the border of a 20,000 people small town in Finland. At 2345h on weekdays there are no cars driving or pedestrians walking here ever.

http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__42809__UAV_3000_Composite_FPV_UAV_Aircraft_3000mm_ARF_USA_Warehouse_.html

When I checked the "new items" page at Hobbyking yesterday, I almost fell from my chair...

A HUGE 3m wingspan fiberglass UAV kit for $263 - $284, depending on the warehouse For some reason, it's not available from the international warehouse but from all local warehouses... Some features and specs from the website:

Features:
• Glassfiber/Ply Fuselage
• Fully Sheeted balsa/ply 2pc Plug In Wing
• Plug In V-Tail
• Huge Payload Capability
• Large Front and Mid-Mounted Access Hatches
• Heavy Duty Under-Carriage with Steerable Nosewheel
• Adjustable Motor Mount
• Large Air Intake & Cooling Duct for ESC/Motor Cooling
• Aerodynamically Efficient Airframe
• Flaps for Excellent Low Speed Handing
• Fast and Easy Build

Specs:
Wingspan: 3000mm
Length:1580mm
Weight: 5200g~5400g
Wing Area: 48dm2
Wing Loading: 108~112g/dm2
5 Channel

Requires:
Your own 6 Channel TX/RX
4 x 12g~16g MG High Torque Servo's, 3 x Standard Servo's
50mm Brushless Outrunner
80A~90A ESC
13"~15" Prop
UBEC
5s~6s Lipoly Battery
FPV Equipment/Camera
80~82mm Spinner

Now I'm waiting for someone to buy it, fly it and talk about quality and stuff :).

Well, for a simulated 737 at least.  via Hackaday:

[Andrea] didn’t want to dig around with the clunky point-and-click interface in FSX, so he created a virtual autopilot with a 2×16 LCD display and an Arduino to interact and set the most common autopilot settings such as altitude, speed, heading, and engagement. The physical interface is just three tact switches and a pot, while the interface to FSX is a custom driver that turns the USB out of the Arduino into actual flight commands.

Video at the link...

Ok, it is not a paint roller. That is just what I thought when I first saw this. Personally, I find the concept interesting, and I can think of some unique uses, including as a remote control paint roller.

But, seriously, I wonder how much flight times might be improved if a "mission" was mostly rolled around on the ground, with only short hops over obstacles? I may have to contact my friend at BG and see if they could send me an evaluation model for some testing.

Check out the specs further here.

We are developing Flone: a interface that allows smartphones to fly.

Right now we are starting with the project, so first we design the airframe, it's a H quadcopter with space for electronics and free field of view for the camera of smartphone.

We would like to keep the design "mini" and easy to build.

At the moment we are using a Multiwii as flight board and a standard camera app in the smartphone.

Our plans is to develop an app than allows to fly with the onboard sensors and telemetry of the smartphone.

We plan to release the hardware with Creative Commons ShareAlike and the source code with GPL, so we would like to have the feedback of the diydrones community.

We published the airframe in Thingiverse, so you can already cut-it with a laser cutter, and we made a Instructables with all the instructions to build one yourself ;)

You can get updated about the project in our webpage: http://flone.cc ( In spanish )

One more thing... we would like to take advantage of this post to remember you that the last day to vote in Drones contest is coming, so if you like our project please vote us in Instructables ;)

Key Features

Looks like a very interesting technology to use on a uav.

We've invented the world's first intelligent throwable camera, a ball capable of stabilized, full spherical 360° photography and video capture. Today, as this fledgling space begins to take flight, we're engineering state-of-the-art technology for the decade ahead. Simply put, cameras and sensors are going airborne.

More info here, www.serveball.com

(Re-posted from: http://conservationdrones.org/2013/07/10/conservation-drones-in-us-fish-wildlife-service-webinar-series/ )

Serge Wich from ConservationDrones.org (http://conservationdrones.org) was recently invited by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to give a talk about the use of UAVs in conservation.

During the Q&A session after his presentation (also in this recording), questions from the audience indicate that they were all very positive about this UAV use, which was a pleasant surprise for us!

The ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) initiative, based at the University of Southampton in the South of England, aims to show that modern rapid prototyping technologies can be used to lower the barriers to entry into the UAV world (mainly in terms of cost) for Earth scientists. Over the last few years we have developed a range of such instrument platforms, including the balloon-launched glider shown in the image above.

In the autumn we will be stepping up a gear and we are looking to broaden the team. If you'd like to spend three years designing and flying small UAVs with us for atmospheric research, see here for more info and get in touch!

Before like two years when I got my first Ladybird toy, I was thinking it will be great if I can charge those wirelessly, without changing the battery. Yes, it is charging very slow, yes it will add some weight, but it will be cool.

QI standard is going forward, and there is already some IDT chipsets available on Mouser  - TX -P9035/P9036 and RX-P9021, but according to first look on the datasheet, those are quite complicated and with a lot of external components.

In difference to those, before a month I saw some wireless charging modules, which seems to be quite cheep and simple.

http://www.elecfreaks.com/5016.html , 5V, option1 two bare boards http://www.elecfreaks.com/store/wireless-charging-module-couple01-p-513.html , 5V option 2, TX module in single module http://www.elecfreaks.com/store/wireless-charging-module-couple02-p-514.html and there is now versions for 3.3V, 9V and 12V ( I guess they just change one Zener diode on the receiver board).

Come home here in Sweden for one week after I place the order (probably because were single pcs. and quite light box). I test both, just with one LED for now (like 15mA) - they was working quite OK for distances up to 1-2cm, just some paper and thin air between TX and RX coils. With appropriate ferite it seems distance and coupling can be even better.

Just to fire further my interest, chip labels on board were erased, but fortunately I found a good picture where most of the labels were visible. Unfortunately no results after some googling, but finally I think I found the manufacturer of chips and some other wireless power/charging modules - it should be Elecoteq Electronics - http://www.liucr.com  Website is only in Chinese, so I read what I can via Google translate. I found no datasheets, but for one there was some basic description

On TX board

XKT-408A wireless charging transmitter IC

http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&rurl=translate.google.se&sl=zh-CN&tl=en&u=http://www.liucr.com/news/show.asp%3Fid%3D317&usg=ALkJrhhemv0tvw6YYMF5qZeMtv5h9YvPeg

T5336 wireless charging IC (I think this is just a MOSFET driver or similar)

On RX board

T3168 wireless charging receiver IC 

Last question is TX/RX coils/antennas. Even modules with antennas is quite light - 5grams with the coil and some power cables, I guess it can be even lighter with PCB antenna, either on flex or thin FR-4. On the Elcoteq website I saw some microcoils and also solutions for high current charging.

I drop a line to the manufacturer, asking for datasheet/app note about the chips - let's see if I have an answer. Until then as a desert, I reverse the schematics from the boards I already have (it is possible I missed or read wrong some connection) and attach them here - transmitter.pdf  and receiver.pdf . I check also some ot the singals on my scope - it seems the working frequency is like 55kHz. If you are better with reading Chinese, you probably will found more interesting things on Elcoteq website, may be even the right datasheets.

That is - hope it helps somebody. I think those can have a lot of applications and be a lot of fun. If you have some ideas or make some new smaller coils let me know. I probably try to enable one of my Ladybirds for wireless charging :)

p.s. hope Elecfreaks will thank me for saving them from tedious task of chip label grinding...

Inspired by Jordi's blog I tried to receive the serial data from a (pre-bound) SPM9645 remote receiver with RPi's GPIO. Maybe this information can be useful to you or it can save you some time. I am happy for some feedback or optimization proposals etc.

The following RPi GPIO Pins are used (*):

• [P1-01]  3.3V
• [P1-06]  GROUND
• [P1-10]  GPIO 15 (RXD)

Before you can use RPi's serial interface /dev/ttyAMA0 to read the data you need to make sure that there is no serial console or kernel debug function that uses the interface.

Remove the following options from your /boot/cmdline.txt:

console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200

Remove the following line from your /etc/inittab:

T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100

Reboot the device and make sure you switched on your Spektrum transmitter (DX6i).

It should now be possible to read the SPM9645 serial data from the serial interface /dev/ttyAMA0:

Python 2.7.3 (default, Jan 13 2013, 11:20:46)

[GCC 4.6.3] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

>>> import serial

>>> from struct import *

>>> port = serial.Serial('/dev/ttyAMA0', baudrate=115200, timeout=3.0)

>>> print unpack('>xxhhhhhhh', port.read(16))

Have fun and stay tuned.

References:

• 2.4ghz: How to read 7 channels with one wire (NOT PPM) with Spektrum modules
• Spektrum DSMX Remote Receiver
• RPi Low-level peripherals
• pySerial

Notes:

It does not seem to be possible to use the suggested baudrate of 125000.

(* of course you can use any other 3.3V or GROUND Pin)

Hi all!

I’d like to start discussion about APM 2.5 and data logging. The reason for that is this graph:

Looks strange doesn’t it? I created it using Mission Planner after some flights, but lets start from the beginning:)

I'm new APM 2.5 user. I successfully completed several flights and I'm quite impressed how all this stuff works.  Only thing which concerns me is  data logging. It just looks strange to me. The way in which all the data is logged makes any further analysis difficult. When analyzing my logs I made some observations  which I’d like to share with you:

>> Current time is logged within GPS messages only - In my opinion all lines should contain time. It would be much easier to compare data using Mission Planner or just excel. As you can see at the graph in post header, data which are logged with different frequencies are hard to compare later. Why? Because we have line number on x-axis instead of time. Time is also useful when you try to check plane response to step disturbance and tune PID using control theory. Believe me – there are some users which just need it. We can log time since APM power-up - not necessarily absolute GPS time. Of course it is possible to estimate time for each line (based on logging frequency) and correct all in excel but it takes a lot of time and it is still guessing.

>> Not all telemetry data can be logged onboard - For some reason it is not possible to log some data onboard. I'm aware of memory limitations, but sometimes you want to log chosen parameters and need only let’s say 40 seconds recording time. I think it should be possible to choose every single variable and record it onboard (compare list of parameters available via telemetry and logged onboard). Most important data for me are: radio input, target parameters (altitude, orientation angles etc.) actual pitch and roll angles, autopilot output commands, airspeed GPS data, pressure altitude, ground course. It would be great to have possibility to log it!

>> It is not possible to connect serial port logger to telemetry port - Not all users want to connect 3d radios / x-bee modules . Sometimes it does not make sense due to limited range or interference which cause data loss. I’m wondering if it is possible to switch off 2-way communication with mission planner and simply connect serial port logger to telemetry port. It could be one more configuration parameter and simple solution for my previous problem.

What do you think? Does it make sense? Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,

Kamil