Blogs

This is a continuation of yesterdays post Introduction to Gigglebots and demonstrates the hardware setup of my soon-to-come software.

This is my full setup for my UAV with full video and telemetry, and steering. I have kept the number of pieces of hardware required to an absolute minimum by utilising all the sensors, cameras and communications from Android phones.

The software talks directly to a MultiWii, and I'm working on a MavLink version, it can also integrate with a microcontroller such as Arduino (by Serial over Bluetooth, or USB on-the-go).

All servos and ESC are configured in the Gigglebots controller software, and has options for servo center, limits and trim buttons. Each servo/ESC can also be assigned a role, such as steering, elevation or throttle. If you so desire you can set exponentials and servo mixing here too. For more complex behavior each channel could also be assigned a mathematical expression to follow.

The RC input screen lets you configure which pins are for PWM input, and what roles they have. Once you have selected these, the program talks to you and asks you to do things like (“push the throttle forward”, “move the rudder to the left” etc) and configures everything for you. No more worrying about reversed channels.

Once all channels are set up, you can view their positions and roles on the main channels screen...

Gains are handled on a separate screen, and all the uncertainties of PID loops have been done away with, in favour of just 2 parameters, Turn Rate, and Straighten. Turn rate tells it how much to turn, Straighten controls when it starts to straighten up again.

More to come soon.  Please check back, or follow me on Twitter.

Follow @Giggletalk

We had our first fully tilted flight:

More information on wingcopter.com

The Q-Brain incorporates 4x 20A speed controllers in 1 device. All motor leads are pre-installed and are terminated with 3.5mm bullet connectors. Leads are 25 cm long which means that you can use this controller with frames up to 60 cm. It operates on 2-4 cells lipo and 5-12 cells Ni-XX (anyone still using these). Refresh rate is over 400Hz.

Weight of the speed controller is 112 grams and dimensions are ~70x62x11 mm. The Q-Brain is probably very similar to the Hobbywing Quattro ESC.

Advantage: Easy install

Disadvantage: If one of the esc's dies you can't use it with a quadcopter anymore (get a tricopter!)

More information on the Hobbyking site

Note: If you are using the Q-Brain with a KK2 board, then S3 (the white cable) has to be connected to M1 on the KK2 to power it.

I've been working on a custom circuit board I am calling the "mavboard" which will be a board that will distribute telemetry connections to various other devices, and allow you to select which port gets the telemetry Rx pin, since only one thing can talk *TO* the APM telemetry port. All other mav ports can sniff the APM Tx pin.

As you can see in the images below, I went a step further and embedded an ATMega directly into the board as well. My vision for this board is not just a "Mavlink Hub" but also a protocol translator for a couple of popular RC Rx devices that offer telemetry options such as FrSky and OpenLRS. What I have working so far is the FrSky conversion originally based from JDrone's jD_IOBoard_FrSkyMAVLink project with refactoring and bug fixes from Vito Ammirata. We have been discussing and making progress over in This Thread and his updated code has been put into GitHub.

When done, all the board design files and schematic will be available for download. The initial prototype is using a number of through-hole components which I would like to switch out to SMD so the board can be smaller (shooting for size of MinimOSD), but I am still exploring options for how to get a small number of SMD boards stuffed without having to hand solder all the components. If interested, I may offer some up for sale so I can get a batch of them made.

(We removed the Chat Feature until we can integrate it onto the site without causing Page Loading time delays and any user errors!  I'm going to work with Ning tomorrow afternoon on trying to fix the chat so that it doesn't affect any of our users.  If that doesn't work we can either wait 1-3 Months until Ning 3.0 is available to us or create an IRC)

We are trying to integrate a chat room feature without slowing down the page loading times on DIYDrones.com and we need your feedback and help.  

What we need from the community:

1. Do you like or dislike the chat feature? (Please explain why)
2. Does it slow down your page loading times and alter your overall user experience on DIYDrones?
3. Is this something you would like to see be perminent on DIYDrones.com?
4. Do you have any suggestions on how to improve it?

Our neighbor, Swerve Co, keeps some of their workers in cages.

From The Atlantic (via Mashable):

Walk onto someone's lawn and you're trespassing; fly over it in a helicopter and you're in the clear — "the air is a public highway," the Supreme Court declared in 1946. But what about the in-between space? Does the availability of unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drones, aka UAVs) throw a wrench in the old legal understandings?

Well, here's where the rubber meets the road for this abstract line of questioning. The Capitol Hill Seattle Blog reports a complaint it received from a resident in the Miller Park neighborhood. She writes:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day. After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing "research". We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

The site adds, "The woman tells us she called police but they decided not to show up when the man left."

From Hackaday:

The GoPro line of HD cameras seem like they were specifically designed for use with quadcopters. We say that because the small, light-weight video devices present a payload which can be lifted without too much strain, but still have enough horse power to capture video of superb quality. Here’s a hack that uses the camera to provide a remote First Person View so that you may pilot the aircraft when it is out of your line of sight.

The camera in question is a GoPro Hero 3. It differs from its predecessors in that the composite video out port has been moved to a mini USB connector. But it’s still there and just a bit of cable splicing will yield a very clear signal. The image above shows the camera in the middle, connecting via the spliced cable to an FPV transmitter on the right. This will all be strapped to the quadcopter, with the signal picked up by the receiver on the left and piped to a goggle display worn by the pilot. You can see the cable being construction process in the clip after the break.

How to Hack your GoPro Hero 3 for FPV from Chad Johnson on Vimeo.

My working CGS. My system consists of the following components. Lenovo thinkpad with full-size USB and 3G network. Radio link is a 3dr radio 915MHz. software is andropilot, APM2.5 with the last firmware. Radio is a Hitec aurora9. Flight data is automatic uploded to www.droneshare.com  (here is my files)Great work

Really wanted to capture that sunset over the estuary. With no warning the engines stopped and it fell out of the air on the second flight out. Really should have had that GoPro in its waterproof case - at least the memory card worked. Spent about 30 min in that knee deep stinking mud.

A few lessons learned ...

By Clay Dillow, contributor

FORTUNE -- Last month the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the unmanned systems industry's largest trade organization, released its first economic study detailing just how an expected $82 billion in economic impacts resulting from the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the national airspace will be spread across the 50 states. But perhaps "detailing" is the wrong word. While the report is arguably the most thorough examination of the burgeoning drone industry's potential economic impacts to date, even the report's own author admits the UAS industry remains so nascent that the data necessary to make comprehensive projections simply doesn't yet exist.

"Assuming the FAA does come up with a set of rules in the next two or three years and we get this thing rolling, here are the things that I'm pretty sure of," says Darryl Jenkins, a 30-year veteran of the aerospace industry who now serves as an airline analyst as well as the co-author of AUVSI's UAS economic impact report. "We'll probably start off with exponential growth over a three- to six-year period. After that the growth rate will level off--it will continue to grow at a faster rate than the economy in general, but it will be slower than it was in the initial years. Those are the things that I'm real sure of. After that a lot of uncertainty comes into the picture."

Indeed, uncertainties abound in the UAS space. Under a Congressional mandate handed down last year, the Federal Aviation Administration is required to integrate small UAS for civilian and commercial applications into the national airspace by end of Q3 2015, essentially opening up American skies to swarms of unmanned systems. (The FAA has projected that 30,000 UAS will be flying by 2020--although what data it used to come up with such a number remains unclear.) But there's no guarantee the FAA will meet that deadline, or what additional restrictions might be placed upon civilian and commercial UAS when they are finally integrated into civilian skies.

MORE: 9 states poised to dominate the drone economy

Then there's the staggering lack of end user data. In the history of aviation there's never been anything like UAS, and until civilian and commercial UAS are allowed to fly it's impossible to know just exactly how--or by whom--they will be employed. And without data on UAS usage and applications--or even how they will be regulated--it's difficult to project how and where the future of the UAS industry will take shape.

Difficult, but not impossible. While hard, numeric data may be scarce, various intangibles and other useful indicators--existing aerospace industry infrastructure, education and workforce training in UAS engineering and operation, existing government and military research facilities, state-by-state policies and legislative attitudes toward UAS--paint a fairly clear picture (if not comprehensive) picture of how the UAS industry can be expected to shape up over the next several years.

There are still plenty of variables that could shake up the UAS landscape, not least of which is the FAA, which will certify six federally-sanctioned UAS test sites across the nation sometime before the end of the year (each test site is expected to draw significant R&D investment to its host state, and there are currently 37 states competing for those six certifications). But by recognizing those variables and factoring in the many intangibles as well as the hard data that is increasingly available, it's possible to begin visualizing where the drone economy lives now, and where it's likely going to live in the future.

Here is a closer look at how drones will affect the U.S. economy.

The APM 2.5 on my 600 sized heli is mounted in a nice box together with the RX as you can see at the picture below.

   The holes where the wiring comes out are plugged with some foam to prevent air turbulence reaching the barometer. The box hangs on 4 ear plugs for vibration isolation, so in a hover I record only about 0.05 g or less of vibration. The heli flies great in all flight modes, flying AltHold sideways, forwards and backwards with high speed; no problems at all.

But only in one situation AltHold played crazy, this was when the heli turned in to a certain heading, which was about 250 to 270degr. At that critical heading the heli suddenly dropped 5m or more, and if you turned out of that heading, the heli went back to its original altitude.

Funny, what has AltHold to do with heading???  It drove me nearly nuts, for weeks as I tried to solve the problem.

I knew AltHold could be negatively influenced by vibrations or by turbulent air at the barometer.  But how can I get the heading into this equation???

The only thing I could think of was the wind, and we have mostly sea breeze.

I knew the heli had a sloppy tail rotor holder due to a missing washer, but it was never a problem.

So I thought, if the wind is in a certain angle to the tail rotor it might cause some vibrations, causing AltHolt to play crazy. So I fixed the sloppy tail and went for a test the next morning. The sea breeze was on, and the heli handled AltHold with no problems in all directions.  

Problem solved!! I felt good.

A few days later I went flying, it was a nice sunny day. Of course I checked first if AltHold was still ok. To my great disappointment turning into that critical heading the heli dropped again.

I studied the logs again, and my next though was about turbulent air at the barometer caused by a certain angle to the wind. Truly I had not a good feeling about it, but it was the only straw I had. “Luckily” I found a small hole in the box containing the APM which was not plugged with some foam. So I plugged the hole tight and went for a test flight the next morning. It was a cloudy morning, the sea breeze was on, and the heli handled AltHold with no problems in all directions.  Problem solved!! I felt good again.

A few days later I went flying, it was a nice sunny day. Of course I checked first if AltHold was still ok. To my second great disappointment turning into that critical heading the heli dropped again.

I went nearly nuts...... I was out of my wisdom!!! What has heading to do with AltHold???

At home I studied the logs again; I knew the problem was in the hardware, but where?

I said to my wife: I feel the same now, as I felt when I had that crazy problem with the weather stations wind direction indicator playing crazy every day between 1 and 2 o’ clock. (It was the sun who disturbed the infra red sensors in the wind direction indicator)

Sun, this was the key word I needed. Not only the wind has a direction; the sun has a direction too. This was a new way to investigate.  The box had a window on the right side covered with acrylic glass to be able to see the LED’s of the APM.

I checked if the angle of the sun could match the critical heading and the position of the window, so the sun could reach the barometer at that critical heading, and it did.

I investigated also the days I thought the problem was solved, and they were always cloudy days. So, almost everything matched with my “Sun Theory”.

So, let’s check it out.

The next day was sunny, and the heli dropped nicely when heading into the critical direction.

Then I covered the window and took off again, and the heli handled AltHold with no problems in all directions. I checked this many times, always when the window was covered, everything was great, and when the window was clear, the heli dropped. It was reproducible, so finally I found the cause for sure.

The only thing I cannot spin my head around is:

The sudden sunshine at the barometer should cause a rise in pressure and this would mean the heli should rise to counter act, but not drop.

Maybe someone else could answer this mystery?

My work in progress: Traxxas Stampede Brushless PX4 APMrover

Now you see it!

Now you don't!

PX4 Safety Button / LED indicator Access and Buzzer port.

Sort of a stealth APMrover, although plans for dual SONAR may be a bit more obvious.

(Maybe I can disguise them as off road lights).

And, of course, no SONAR till one of the highly esteemed developers puts APMrover SONAR capability on the PX4.

Going to try to do this with an 8 channel PPM encoder and a stock Traxxas 4 channel rock crawler type transmitter (not the 2 channel one that came with it).

The 1/8" T6 polished aluminum diamond plate base plate is a bit of overkill and I need heavier springs.

But I am planning on mounting some interesting stuff on it and it provides excellent EMF shielding for the PX4 and the magnetometer in particular.

The latest APMrover code is installed in the PX4 and is functional, but still need to get an encoder for it.

I will post updates here as this project progresses.

Should be fun!

It seems the most of the bugs have been worked out, so I'm taking droneshare out of beta.  If you'd like to give it a shot it is now a standard feature of Andropilot, just pick a username and password in settings.

For instance, in the table above, here's the flights today (Norway, Canada and Estonia): 

(Also, if anyone is interested in hacking on droneshare - either the 'backend' or the javascript code, please send me a note and I'll share the git repo).

Now it is time for the SNL side of DIY Drones. Sometimes when you think that you have the biggest UAV on the block, you get surprised:-)

Passenger plane flies 800 kilometers without a pilot

• 00:00 11 May 2013 by Paul Marks

After an accident with the octo, i've got 2 motors shaft broken. Since there isn't a replacement shaft, i bought one of the following shaft and use it with the DT750. The steps for DT700, DT900 and DT1000 are similar:

Ф4.0x67.0mm Motor Shaft for A3548 Series Motor
http://www.rctimer.com/index.php?gOo=goods_details.dwt&goodsid=544&productname=

The last post I show you pictures of my 3D printed quad. It took me more than thought to test it in flight.  The climate and labor, plotted.

Test flight was successful. It flew solid, pretty stable, less noisy than my other models (May be I'm getting deft). 
3s 4000mah LiPo = 10 min.

I have to work on it lighter. I have some ideas. But for now I'll finish the gimbal G3.

For more info please visit: https://www.facebook.com/Argfly

So what does a cat toy and a PCB have to do with UAVs?

Very easy: One of my dogs had taken my cat's pole toy and left little but the handle stick. I was wondering what to do with that now. At that time, my MF450 frame was on my desk waiting to be completed and I shortly before read about external LED indicators. I also mounted my APM on top of the frame and was worried about damages in case of a flipover.

So - I cut the stick in halves - well somewhat half... Then I soldered suitable resistors for 5V to the LEDs and short cables with 3p jumper plugs. After that I filled the respective parts of the stick with heat glue - pretty much completely to give some additional stability. For mounting, I pushed an M3x35 bolt into the still soft heat glue.

As a result, I have two little masts which carry the external LEDs for GPS and ARM as well as double as some kind of "roll cage" to protect the APM in case of a crash.

As for the PCBs, I did have massive stability problems with my quad in Alt Holt mode and was advised that vibrations might be the cause. The MF450's gimbal comes with rubber balls which are a good bit too soft for that gimbal construction (the gimbal shakes badly) so I mounted the roll servo to the frame with double-sided tape and had the rubber balls as a leftover. I also recently bought a 50 pack of small PCBs from eBay, so I made a quick-and-dirty (and cheap) anti-vibration mount from 4 rubber balls and 2 PCBs.

That's the final result:

The anti-vibration mount will be tested soon when I got my new props.

Hi ya'll,

So the Google maps 'My places' feature is a great way to share locations where UAV hobbyists can fly their vehicles.  Just have someone in your local club create a new 'my place' and then plop down a few markers with descriptions.  Once they have created the place, they can then click on "Collaborate" and list users who are allowed to edit the map (or even just let anyone edit it).

For each flying site, you can include site rules, pointers to websites etc...

For instance, here's the map the local San Francisco area pilots are maintaining.