I made a video showing how I used a $20 ADS-B receiver to overlay air traffic on FPV video from my drone--in a web browser. The blog post, "Augmented reality display of air traffic for amateur drones" has more details, including instructions on how you can do the same thing.
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Calling all drone lovers in the Los Angeles and Orange County area! We are excited to announce the formation of the Los Angeles and Orange County Drone User Group (LA-OC DUG). LA-OC DUG welcomes both total newbies and experienced users, hobbyists and professionals, and anyone who is curious or enthusiastic about this exciting technology. We will be getting together up as a community to share our ideas and experiences, fly our drones, collaborate on community service projects and technology demonstrations, and hold drone building workshops.
Our first event will be a drone show and tell on June 12. If you are in the Los Angeles/OC area, please visit our Meetup page and consider joining our group. LA-OC DUG is led by Mike Rivard.
LA-OC DUG is part of the Drone User Group Network, an association of community organizations that seek to promote the responsible use of flying robots for community service, artistic, entrepreneurial, and recreational purposes. Current Drone User Group Network members include The DC Area Drone User Group, Baltimore Drones, and LA-OC DUG. If you are interested in starting a Drone User Group in your area or having your current organization be part of our network, please send an email to info@dcdrone.org .
This video demonstrates a new robotic bird, "Robo Raven," whose wings flap completely independently of each other, and also can be programmed to perform any desired motion, enabling the bird to perform aerobatic maneuvers. This is the first time a robotic bird with these capabilities has been built and successfully flown. 'Robo Raven', developed by University of Maryland Professors S. K. Gupta and Hugh Bruck and their students uses two programmable motors that can be synchronized electronically to coordinate motion between the wings. 'Robo Raven' can now be programmed to any desired motion patterns for the wings which allows new in-flight aerobatics—like diving and rolling—that would have not been possible before, bringing the 'Robo Raven' team a big step closer to faithfully reproducing the way real birds fly.
The Maryland Robotics Center is an interdisciplinary research center housed in the Institute for Systems Research within the
A. James Clark School of Engineering. The mission of the center is to advance robotic systems, underlying component technologies, and applications of robotics through research and educational programs that are interdisciplinary in nature and based on a systems approach.
The center's research activities include all aspects of robotics including development of component technologies (e.g., sensors, actuators, structures, and communication), novel robotic platforms, and intelligence and autonomy for robotic systems. The center consists of faculty members spanning the following academic departments: Aerospace Engineering, Bioengineering, Biology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Kinesiology and Mechanical Engineering. Research projects in the center are supported by the major federal funding agencies including NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, AFOSR, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and NIST.
Current research areas
. Collaborative, Cooperative, Networked Robotics:bio-inspired robotics concepts, time-delayed robotics, robotic swarms, robotic cooperation under limited communication, and distributed robotics.
. Medical Robotics: MRI-compatible surgical robotics, haptics-enabled AFM, exoskeletons for rehabilitation, and magnetic micromanipulation for drug delivery.
. Miniature Robotics: mesoscale robots; bio-inspired sensing, actuation, and locomotion; cell manipulation (optical, AFM based, and micro fluidics); and micro and nano manipulation (optical and magnetic).
. Robotics for Extreme Environments: space robotics and autonomous deep-submergence sampling systems.
. Unmanned Vehicles: micro air vehicles, unmanned sea surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and planetary surface rovers.
Being sick about changing the flight modes of APM 2.5 on my Turnigy 9x via rotary pot (which is actually not really practicable), I searched for alternatives to switch.
What are the possibilities ?
1. Buying a rotary Switch for the 9x with presoldered Resistors - 30$ - No Way
2. Buying the Switch and solder the Resistors by myself - maybe 3-5$ - possible but not satisfying
3. Thinking about the Problem and finding a Solution - priceless
So i decided for #3 --> Big Thank to my good friend Direk from BBC (Bavarian Baustel Crew) who is a electrotechnical Crack and his CNC Machine ;)
This is the result:
The Flight Mode Controller Board Alpha 0.1
It's made to fit in the 9x above the Mainboard.
1. Switching Flightmodes via buttons with LED Feedback
2. Adding a I2C to 9x for a Nunchuck Controller
3. Controlling a Pan/Tilt Cam by Gyro (Turning your Head turns the Cam) or Joystick of the Nunchuck
4. Controlling your RC Plane / Drone / Whatever over UMTS or even EDGE (PPM over IP)
5. Integration in 9x Software
6. Mavlink
7. Interfaceing a brushless Gimbal (actually i have to add some Motor Drivers)
8 ...
Every business office needs one of these.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/210417487/bench-model-plastic-injection-machine
Boooo...
After a good day out yesterday, I took my small quad out for some full stick action tonight.
And it was all going well until...I think I sheared off a motor. At 20m. So this happened:
Reason I think the bolt sheared, is the fine thread left in the bottom of the motor (I tried to show it in the pic). And the way it just tumbled out the sky. I think you can see it in the logs from the motor logs (crash event starts at 20 with impact at 20.4).
Up until then it was flying well - but if anything a little under powered; feels more "Nissan Micra" than "Nissan GTR". Though it would appear the mounts can't handle it if you drive the Micra like a GTR...
It appears the legs took the brunt - all props and unsheared motors are ok, as is rx/telem, battery GPS and APM. Motors were pretty hot when I picked it up - they'd been working hard.
Vibes until then were good - +/-5 to 6 when doing full sticks, and +/-2 when hovering:
I've attached the flight log, just in case anyone wants to prove my "sheared motor" theory wrong.
After months of promises, the Raspberry Pi camera is finally heading out to hackers and makers across the world. Of course the first build with the Pi cam to grace the pages of Hackaday would be removing the IR filter, and it just so happens [Gary] and his crew at the Reading hackerspace are the first to do just that.
As [Gary] shows in his video, the process of removing the Pi cam’s IR filter is extremely fiddly. Getting the filter out of the camera involves removing the sensor, gently cutting it open with a scalpel, and finally gluing the whole thing back together with a tiny bit of superglue. Not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for anyone without a halfway decent bench microscope.
If you’re looking for a Raspberry Pi-powered security camera, game camera, or something for an astronomy application, this is the way to make it happen. You might want to be careful when removing the IR filter; [Gary] broke one camera on their first attempt. They got it to work, though, and the picture quality looks pretty good, as seen in the videos below.
Click Here for More Pictures & Information
Our location is about an hours drive south of the U.S border in Northern Baja California. We have approximately seven square miles of isolated training & testing space which we lease from local Mexican land owners (EJIDO). Our exclusive concession with the EJIDO covers UAV hobby through manned, ultralight aircraft.
We will be conducting clinics for students who who want to get up-to-speed as quickly and safely as possible. Our first offering will be for new Arducoptor pilots. These five-day events include ground transportation from/to the San Diego Airport, daily breakfast, lunch & happy hour.
We are looking for one or two volunteers to help us fine-tune our curriculum and other aspects of our program.
My first ever video from a quad
This will bring a laugh to the veterans...
After spending a few months and every available night doing flying since I took up the hobby, tonight, I took the plunge and slapped a go-pro 2 underneath my quad legs. Absolutely no attempt was made at optimization, alignment or vibe control.
Try and spot how many error I make, both in technical setup, cinematics and piloting...I think I count at least 18. :-)
Total flight time 13 minutes, using 2 x 4000 6S instead of 1x11,000 - still had 3.85v left in the cell (about another 3-4 minutes). Spot of rain were appearing, so had to land quickly (I don't have the dome fitted).
Most notable (apart from my dreadful piloting skills) was the climb at about 11 minutes in...this is the first time I used 100% throttle on the climb, and it did not like it; it lurched quite dramatically. 100% is not actually recommended for my rig, as ecalc recons 90% is the maximum watts for my motors (MN3508-29's 380kv). Sure enough, the motor were noticeably warm on landing, when normally they are barely warm at all. Time to get some throttle limits set in APM, but not sure how yet. Might just set the rpm alarm on the DX8/TM1000.
I engaged loiter at minute 6 minutes, and it seems a bit jittery. No real winds to speak of at ground level, but there might have been at 140m and above the tree line. Opinions welcome of course - I might just be paranoid.
It's still yawing very slightly on throttle as well - on alt hold descents, you can see it very slowly circle around nose-in on the vertical line of descent. Checked all physical alignments with tape measure and spirit levels, and recalibrated the Accels, moved some electrics out the way... but it's still doing it.
You can also hear the whistle/whine quite distinctly now.
Flight logs attached for those who are interested. Next logs will include Current and Motor parameters too - looks like I might need them.
Look how well you can navigate using just el cheapo optical flow odometry & sonar. Over carpet, 0.5 meters is all you get before the camera loses velocity detection. Over the floor pattern, it can do 2 meters.
Went back to position->velocity->tilt feedback. That was done in 2007, then changed to position->tilt in 2008, when GPS got good enough. For very precise indoor navigation, position->velocity->tilt feedback seems to be better. This seems to be what Arducopter also uses.
Originally saw position->tilt in Mikrokopter when it was open source, thinking it was going to be the standard design. It was faster, but caused more toilet bowl effect. That crazy German even used position->throttle for altitude.
Vision guidance doesn't have doppler shift, which makes velocity delayed. Also, the IMU drifts too much to limit velocity by clamping tilt at a reasonable value. You have to clamp velocity so a long movement doesn't go out of control.
Increased the optical flow frame rate to 50. There is always a hunt for the highest frame rate before the minimum speed becomes too high, yet not too slow to have too much error. Those improvements made it pretty damn stable.
There were some cheap optical flow floor covers at the dollar store. It takes painting 3 with a dry brush to create a reasonable flying space.
No better than unrolled garbage bags, but the most compact material. Can't imagine who would ever use them as table covers.
The 1st board which didn't have any defects. It worked on the 1st power up. It makes sense, because after that, you realized you needed a day job.
Didn't have much luck with the MB1043 but the MB1240 was golden. That can range useful altitudes over carpet, with the propeller noise. mm or cm accuracy didn't make any difference.
It's hard to conceive a business model for something that flies for only 5 minutes & needs a special floor. The AR Drone did it by implementing an easy programming language & having enough spare clockcycles for developers to process the video. Something smaller, with no spare clockcycles would be harder.
Finally completed the 3dr mod on my 9x. Seems to link up instantly - no more waiting for mission planner to download parameters or the awkwardness of forwarding the mav data back out over bluetooth!
More details, as requested:
The stock 9x has the Throttle Cut and Aileron switches connected to a UART on the Atmega. These need to be re-routed to free up the UART for telemetry purposes. There are several posts out there on how to do it - this was the cleanest (from https://code.google.com/p/open9x/downloads/detail?name=9x_modifications_EN.pdf):
Since I have a smartieparts 9x programmer, I didn't have to worry about the connections going to the header on the left - just the two connections that are circled in red.I reused the resistors that came off the pads (Thanks to Rod for his fine soldering skills). Note that the connections are made from the bottom most resistor pads up to the resistors then they cross over and attach to the two free pads on the right. Keep in mind that once this mode is made, firmware is required that knows about the new locations.
After that, I installed the smartieparts programmer according to their installation instructions:
http://www.smartieparts.com/shop/index.php?main_page=page&id=9
With that in place, the extra UART is now availible on the TelemeterEZ port (two pin header, top row, left):
The 3dr air module conveniently runs at 5v, so I grabbed 5v and ground off the back PCB (you can just barely see the connections in the 2nd photo from the top above). 5v is in the middle, ground on either side of it.
When installing, I connected power and ground to the 3dr module first (red and black wires on the cable that came with it). Fired up mission planner and when through the radio setup to load the correct settings into the module. Then I unplugged the usb radio for the PC (to make sure it didn't interfere) and powered up my quad - data stated flowing to the module in the 9x. This made it easy to identify which way to hook up the RX/TX lines to the TelemetryEZ port on the 9x Programmer board using my DSO Quad pocket scope.
Next time I open up the 9x, I'll grab photos of the actual connections. The OpenTx developers are currently working on adding Mavlink support - I was a little impatient and rolled my own, but I do intend on getting my code to them so they can merge all the best ideas.
I should also add that I'm not 100% sure the radio module won't draw too much power... it probably makes sense to at least add a cap between the power and ground connections to help the regulator out.
In a previous post, I put video up from my attempt at a cheap HD camera quad. I was using a WLtoys v959 quad as the airframe, and an Emerson Action Cam GoPro knock-off as the camera. It worked, but with terrible jello effect on the video. I finally bought an 808 #16 keychain camera with a D wide angle lens from MassiveRC after reading some good reviews, and seeing some great video. However, when it arrived, my quad was down thanks to a crash...argh!
So, I waited for my spare parts, and some better props from GWS. Long story short, all the parts came together this past weekend, but holiday plans, and work obligations over the last several days kept me from flying until today. It was worth the wait! In winds which, honestly, I probably should have not been flying in, the new props allowed the quad to handle beautifully! Some quick balancing of the props before the flight also meant I had relatively jello free video. In fact, a quick flight indoors after my high-wind adventure revealed the breeze to be a major culprit in shakiness of the video, as it was dolly smooth. Not too surprising considering how light this quad is, and given 8mph steady winds, with a recorded gust up to 14mph during the flight. In fact, it was the 14mph gust which drove me back into the house. After a rebuild this last weekend, the last thing I wanted to do was rebuild again this weekend.
Hopefully a better flying day will come around soon, and by then I will have the camera settings and the mounting system tweaked to provide some great cheap HD aerial video!
The Texas Legislature has passed a drone bill, which only requires the Governor's signature to become law.
Description, from The Verge:
The Texas Privacy Act makes it a misdemeanor the use aerial drones to film any person or private property "with the intent to conduct surveillance," but it also carves out a whopping 40 exemptions. According to the bill's text, law enforcement officers will have wide authority to use surveillance drones both with and without a warrant, in order to investigate crime scenes or pursue individuals when police have "reasonable suspicion" that they have committed a crime — among a host of other circumstances. The bill also has broad exemptions for oil and electrical companies, real estate agents using drones for "marketing purposes," educational institutions, and areas within 25 miles of the Mexican border.
Read morehere
This blimp floated through every now and then, it was very peacful.
Pleased to announce today that my new App FIND MY DRONE is now available in the App Store. FIND MY DRONE is a FREE App that connects your iPhone to your personal UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) using the popular MAVLink protocol.
Watch this space, FIND MY DRONE will soon be followed by MAVPilot, a ground control station for your pocket.
more info
http://www.communistech.com/blog/now-in-the-app-store-find-my-drone/
http://www.communistech.com/blog/products/
Download from the App Store
Hi ya'll,
I just posted about this on the APM dev list, but it would be great to get some participation in a drones.stackexchange site. For those not familar stackexchange/stackoverflow is a great web format for asking questions and getting answers. The person who asks the question marks the best answer (karma?) and (hopefully) a whole ecosystem of drone users helping other drone users develops. I think it has the potential to be possibly an even better way of doing many of the Q&A type posts here on diydrones.
I've just created a proposal to have a drones.stackexchange.com, and now is the point where stackexchange does an evaluation to see if there is enough interest to make the site. Can you please help?
The steps are easy:
- Go here and choose to follow this proposed group.
- Post a sample question of the sort you'd think a drones Q&A site could answer.
- Upvote the questions that you think are the best examples of the sort of Q&A a site like this could provide.
- (optional) Please pass the word on various other drone sites.
After we pass the hurdle of 50 followers/upvoted questions then the site will go live and we'll see how useful it is (or is not). I promise to promptly answer any andropilot questions ;-)
For their first humanitarian mission, Adam and Emanuele from Drone Adventures went to Haiti to explore the potential use of drones to map encampments, riverbeds and entire villages.
You can read more about the mission, the equipment and the results in the full article:
http://robohub.org/drone-adventure-in-haiti/
Dear folks
Some of you are already aware about the phonedrone board and the contribution of Falko to it. Now we thought to continue on his work and after working on it for 3 months, we are proud to announce that we were able to manage the control of our plane with the board and android and we would be glad to share our knowledge.
We especially created a blog about this project. It contains all the useful links to start up with the configuration of the board, an explanation on the work of Falko (the German dude), an explanation on the work we have performed and our contribution to it, links to our github, links to our youtube films about the project, etc...
We think that our gained knowledge should be shared and that the people could just grab the open source software we created and continue on it.
The link to our blog
https://sites.google.com/site/phonedroneboard/
Sincerely,
The Robotic Research Group
P.S. during the next weeks we are planning to share more info about our new tests and our future ideas for this project, change the interface of the blog, keep the people up to date about our newest software.
It should be a great idea to share the link on the selling page for phonedrone board of the 3D robotics store
Planetary Resources launched a Kickstarter project to fund a first-of-its-kind public "Hubble Space Telescope."
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/arkyd-a-space-telescope-for-everyone-0
From their project site, "The proceeds from this campaign will go to several different areas: 1) To actually launch the satellite into space. 2) To support the spacecraft over its lifetime — including manpower to facilitate the photos, "selfies", monitoring the spacecraft and training the staff at the chosen science center that will take over control. 3) To create an easy-to-use Control Interface that will allow ANYONE to access and control the satellite. 4) To fund the creation of an incredible, interactive educational experience that can be used by schools anywhere, to enable students to experience space in a way that's never been possible."
A public space telescope shares analogous challenges with Unmanned Aircraft Systems - command and control issues, communications issues (including security), mission planning for user sessions, data collection and ground processing, user interface issues - and introduces possible new issues with solutions applicable to down-to-Earth UAS projects, such as error-free methods for control and data collection handoff between user teams, and distributed sessions management with the same vehicle but from different sites (different users controlling the scope from different sites, via the Internet, one at a time or maybe even in parallel?)
There may be opportunities for the DIY Drones community to apply its hands-on experience and lessons learned to a public space telescope operated over the Internet.
I copied this from a news article on nineMSN (link to article below)... Once again the key concern appears to be people looking into other peoples back yards... I haven't seen anyone draw attention to the potential danger in having a cowboy crash into a crowd, into traffic or destroy property... just record hi-res images of their p**ed off neighbor in their back yard...
For every mini drone that Australia's air safety watchdog knows about there are two that escape its notice.
Officials from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) told a Senate Estimates hearing on Wednesday how difficult it was to regulate drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that weigh less than seven kilograms and can be purchased easily online from overseas.
CASA director of aviation safety John McCormick told the hearing the commercial drone industry had doubled in the past year with licence holders jumping from 15 to 38.
There were also 12 applications in the pipeline.
They expect overall figures to double again next year.
Regulations are being reviewed.
He said current regulations did not envisage the explosion in numbers among the low weight octocopters that can be ordered online and sometimes carry high fidelity cameras.
There are privacy concerns that mini drones could be used to spy on people in their backyards.
"We are now looking at trying to regulate them," Mr McCormick said.
"I would dare say that for every UAS (unmanned aircraft system) we know exists there are most probably two that we don't know of."
Mr McCormick said the difficulty was that when someone reported the mini drones being flown, by the time CASA is able to get there, the person has gone.
"It's almost impossible to track who it is," he said.
