The future of RC surely looks promising ...I cant wait to fly with new packs that allow me to fly longer, weigh lighter and most importantly charge faster ...How would a couple of hours of flight time sound like to FPV Fanatics?? Just SUPREME !! .....I was even thinking of air to air battery charging just like air to air refueling..24 hour endurance for MAV's how awesome would that be? ...lets hope these batteries can charge faster than they discharge ...by the sound of it they truly are capable of such a feat...before I go bonkers over this.. I will let you check out this link
I recently had my 4th in-flight motor shutdown on my old 3DR Quad - I think I've finally figured it out so I thought I'd share the story so others can check for the same problem as well as show some logfile diagnosis.
My earlier flip deaths were from quite low so I didn't have a chance to see what was going on, and I didn't have the motor logging on to see which one shut down. I also suspected I could have been having brownouts in the past as I was powering my gimbal servos from the signal pins for a while until I discovered that was *BAD*.
This one was from high enough that I could observe and try a couple of things on the way down. It definitely still had power to the APM and some of the motors as you could hear it trying to correct itself, I switched out of auto mode into stabilize, pulled the throttle back to idle then up again in the hope it would restart the 4th motor, but it didn't. I heard the other three spin up again and whine dramatically but it never corrected. It thumped into the ground, broke all the props, bent the arms, but all the electronics survived (even the S100 camera). Reinforcing the message: NEVER FLY OVER PEOPLE! For sure that would have caused more than a bruise if someone was below it.
From the logs it looks like it was the #4 engine that quit (rear-right on a quad), as you can see it suddenly pitches up and rolls right, commanding more power for the #4 and less power to the opposing #3 engine (to no avail, as there's no RPM feedback in our current hardware so it doesn't know the motor is out).
The frustrating thing was that after this crash when I tested the motors they all ran fine, just like the previous flip crashes, so I was at a bit of a loss to diagnose the problem. I thought it could be low power and bad ESC programming that would cause the #4 ESC to cut out early, so I ran an old pack right down and all 4 motors slowed down in sync together as the voltage dropped off.
So I knew it was something with the #4 motor and it was unlikely to be the ESC as I'd replaced that before after one of the crashes. I removed the props, ran the motors and pulled and jiggled all the wires around to check the connections and...
BINGO!
The motor glitched then restarted. I pulled the cable some more and it stopped altogether. Here's a vid showing the problem:
Turns out a bad wire connection to this motor had caused me 4 crashes and lots of headscratching. One more for the 3DR Quality Assurance department I think (well, 4 more...)
So a lesson for all: when you're finished a new build and periodically thereafter, remove your props, run your motors and jiggle all the wires around to check you have solid connections!
In the Cub Scout outlaw pinewood derby, anything goes as long as the car fits on the track.
Frankencar is an Arduino-controlled, 400-Watt torque monster that smokes the competition. It was pieced together using VEX Robotics hardware, an outrunner brushless motor, an Arduino Nano, and various other components. A key feature is that Frankencar knows when it’s close to the finish line so it can slam on the brakes.
The video above is a great example of the sort of action you’ll see at RoboGames. Tomorrow kicks off the 10th year of the event, a three-day extravaganza of robots and technology. The dozens of competitions cover everything from line following and fire fighting to weight lifting and mech warfare.
If you’re in the Bay Area, consider stopping by for at least a few hours; it’s going to be a blast. If you can’t make it, leave a comment below with the competition you’d like to see photos of and I’ll do my best to cover it.
This weekend in over 75 cities, NASA is hosting the Space Apps Challenge. Citizens from around the world will collaborate to tackle challenges relevant to improving life on Earth and the exploration of space.
I just wanted to share my experience from the last 1+ years improving my quad, I hope not to bore you. :D
Also, I am open for any cool suggestions from any of you.
The main objective until now, has been to build all parts needed for this quad by myself, to not to depend on spare parts that needs to be bought from Hong Kong stores or stuff like that, if anything breaks, I should be able to fix it with the tools and materials available.
What I am having problems with right now is that I don't have landing gear, I am not sure if I need it, sometimes I do, most of the times not.
The first quad was an ELEV8 kit with a Hoverfly Pro, that copter was abused by my inexperience flying any kind of RC aircraft, now that copter is gone and the hoverfly is resting in a box, maybe will use it in the future.
Now it's time for the APM2.5
After many different frames, most of them made out of aluminum and kitchen tables, I decided it was time to go with carbon fiber.
I bought some CF tubes and plates from Hobbyking and started with the building process.
The results are a very stable quadcopter.
I am using the following components:
APM2.5
Turnigy Plush 30A ESC's
RCTimer 880kv motors
3S 5000mAh and 2200mAh
Yesterday I recived the usb connector to be able to use the gopro3 for FPV, it's all soldered and mounted in the quad, can't wait for the weekend and give it a try for the first time, probably will end up at the top of a tree :D.
Here is a test flight (no FPV) that I did a couple of weeks ago:
Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Posted by Liam Honecker on April 19, 2013 at 12:00am
The picture to the right is a small photovoltaic charge controller in the tractor (right).
It was made by lyncom around 2001 a company possibly purchased by Kyocera. It is pretty much a toy, but the resin encapsulation is similar to higher end charge controllers such as USA made Flexcharge and should weather well (better than
the rest of MY shoddy fabrication skills!). The reverse flow blocking diode an LED so it lets you know if it is working. Neither Flexcharge nor this lyncom support charging lithium ion batteries (like the SabretoothESC I'm using says it d
oes). The lyncom has done a fine job boosting the battery voltage in early spring sun for even a short period of time. The panel is a direct from China eBay special, 10 watt polycrystalline el-cheap-o. I dremmelled out the junction box a little.
I also made some progress with a rickety makeshift pedal switch (below). It probably won't last long, but it works and will be covered by the plastic pedal. The tractor is a basket case right now, which is good until the end of the semester. I'm so obsessed with robots right now that I'm questioning my life decisions. I feel like this is exactly what was happening when I built my first computer. That gave me valuable skills, robots might be more important than my Ph.D. If I was a better coder I could bring some of these machine learning ideas into political science. I'm not the next Steve Wozniak, or Jobs (since we're both ENTPs). I'm happiest right now when I'm contributing to this corpus, or body of the mind.
Another small victory, I was able to VNC from VMware into the raspberri pi with X11VNC like I had hoped, but I didn't make a startup script in the init.d like I need to. I did not get distracted by the new Kali linux, and definitely not distracted by an Rpi asterisk. I am completely smitten with the idea of Interactive Voice Response working on the pi and having my robot talk to me. I love the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) feature of having the Rpi speak its IP address on the asterisk iso. I got the CMU Festival package running and played with it on the command line. It sounded a little better than my Amiga 500 did when I was 8. I got a little distracted.
I remember reading that the old body style Prius (the one that looks like an Echo) had 244 D cell Ni-Cad batteries. A friend of mine made a laptop battery from 10 Ni-Cads in battery packs taped together (10x1.2=12). I'm guessing that the 18650's are what are in the new Tesla cars now. I have recently taken apart a few laptop batteries apart to feed my flashlights the 18650 cells I find inside. It wasn't until reading lady ada's battery tutorial that I got a sense of exactly how volatile the unprotected cells can be. I ordered $20 bucks worth, 10 protected cells 3.6 amp/hour @ 3.7 volts from an ebay importer to tinker with (7.2amps @ 14.4 volts as a pack). The price per amp is close to the retail I paid for the (7.5 amp/hour @12v) Sealed Lead Acid at Wall-Mart.
The biggest problem is still figuring out how to mount the servo to the irregularly shaped chassis of the peg perego. Everything is waiting for me to solve this problem. I had an epiphany in bed one morning and had to draw it (below). I haven't worked out the details, but at least I have a plan. To compound the problem, I also ordered pneumatic tires. I felt pretty inspired after seeing what saltydog (the url domain goes to the famous cafe which is interesting) had done at modified powerwheels. I really admire the simplicity of his approach; put a drill in it, and move the drill's high quality switch to the pedal.
This provoked me to contemplate the steering linkages which may need to be replaced if the . The tie rods are already very difficult to turn and the wheel provided a lot of leverage. The rubber tires will just make them more difficult.I may need to remove the existing plastic and replace it with some sort of ball bearing joint or even completely new spindles (a new word I've learned). Steering is just fascinating and I have been having a very difficult time visualizing this problem.
I searched for Peg Perego and 3D printing and found another "powerwheel" project. This approach felt much more steeped Mechanical Engineering than garage mechanic. I noticed he was using Google sketchup so I downloaded google sketchup and made my first attempt at a 3D drawing. I drew the pentagonal shaped final drive on the gear box, which if I could print and add to thingiverse, 3d warehouse or the like would solve a very common problem for folks building rovers from kids-ride-on-toys. I may be able to use an ABS printer in the near future, so I'll need to improve my sketches considerably.
I hope my user generated content is of some value to other makers out there, and Mr. Anderson. I appreciate diydrones' hospitality, I'm not sure if squatting here, or for adopting me. I realize lots of the developers are into flying, but it's taken me a while to do my own orienteering. The margin for error is simply too thin for me to do the kind of tinkering I like to do at those speeds. The recent UAV safety hortatory was certainly sobering.
I can't be the only one who has had some trouble coming up with a good way to mount an FPV camera on their quad. So I designed a simple snap together mount that I would like to share! This thing presses together and glues to your frame with some hot glue. It weighs 5 grams. I designed it with universal (should be anyways) slots for mounting screws. Just lift the camera off the board a bit with spacers and screw it on with servo mount screws. Below is the CAD file. I am glad to share with anyone who has the ability to make this themselves. If you don't, but want one: go to my site openrcdesign.com (still a work in progress), click on FPV CAM Mount and buy one for $15. Ill have a post about the frame its mounted on in a few days. The APM mount is of particular interest.
You've likely already received a message in your inbox to set up your new store account at http://store.3drobotics.com
We're moving to a new, open source, more flexible platform called Spree.
All of the old DIY Drones store customer data has been migrated to the new site. For security, we just need you to set a new password using the link in the e-mail sent to you.
Both old and new stores will be open and accepting orders for the next 2 weeks. We'll then shut down the old DIY Drones store to new orders, and leave it open for reference only for another 2-4 weeks. We'll then turn the old store off, and have the data backed up for historical purposes.
We've spent a lot of time reviewing and testing the new store, but there will inevitably be issues. We'll do our best to monitor this thread, but feedback is best received at feedback@3drobotics.com. Additional enhancements to the ordering experience will be rolling out as well in the next few weeks.
We appreciate your business here at 3D Robotics, and look forward to providing you with the most innovative and affordable open source UAV products for a long time to come.
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – The Florida Legislature has passed a bill limiting law enforcement agencies' use of the remotely controlled aircraft known as drones.
The House unanimously approved the Senate's bill (SB 92) 117-0 on Wednesday with no debate.
It now goes to Gov. Rick Scott. The governor has previously said he would sign it into law.
The measure restricts the use of drones to the prevention of imminent danger to life -- a kidnapping or a missing child -- or serious damage to property.
It also makes police get search warrants before using drones to collect evidence. An exception would be a credible threat of a terrorist attack.
Only three law enforcement agencies in Florida are currently licensed by the federal government to fly drones. None are yet using them.
Here are a few pics of a recent project - a inexpensive DIY vacuum-formed styrene quad frame that can take any abuse thrown at it. So far it has survived flying in a downpour, falling from great heights and getting hit with a barrage of paintballs - and it's survived it all with no problems. Today we're testing water take-off's and landings. Wish us luck...
This was my first guided flight a couple of months ago, just getting around to posting it. Video is shot with my iPhone in hand, make sure to view in HD.
Hello, I am Frank Magazu. I am 16 years old and go to school in Pasco, Florida. I make robots with the Arduino and got interviewed by my school district. Here is a video of me. Thanks for helping me become proficient at robotics as well as electronics and programing in general.
Thank you Frank! You made our day with your email. Keep up with the great work you and your professor are doing to inspire more people in getting involved in diy robots.
Don’t be surprised if you hear a buzzing sound in the hallways of South Hall this semester; it’s the sound of the future, in the form of small student-piloted unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones.
This semester, a small team of School of Information students is experimenting with drones: becoming familiar with drones’ capabilities and imagining their future applications. The eight students, who call their group the “Drone Lab,” are working together in a South Hall classroom to develop open-source software for their drones and then testing them in the classroom, in the building’s atrium, and (occasionally) on the South Hall lawn.
“Drones have a pretty bad reputation,” admitted Dave Lester, a second-year MIMS student; when most people hear the word “drone,” they imagine high-tech killing machines or government surveillance. “We’re trying to do something a little different in Drone Lab,” said Lester, who was formerly the assistant director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. “We’re interested in the technical capabilities of drones, but also thinking through the socially good things that we can use drones for.”
“It’s a terrible, awful shame that many people only think of drones as flying objects that deliver weapons to targets,” said associate professor Coye Cheshire, Drone Lab’s faculty sponsor. “Just like airplanes, rockets, cars, and boats—you can tie a weapon on to any of those things, or you can do something interesting and maybe even helpful or good with them.”
Consumer-grade quadcopter
The students’ drones wouldn’t be capable of high-altitude surveillance, even if they were interested in it, since its range is limited to a couple hundred feet. The students are working with the Parrot AR.Drone 2.0, a consumer-grade drone priced at about $300 that’s a step above a model airplane, but many steps below military or civilian surveillance drones. The AR.Drone is a quadcopter—a small helicopter with four rotors—and it comes equipped with a high-definition 720p forward-facing camera, a downward-facing camera, an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a pair of ultrasound altimeters, a rechargeable battery, and a 1GHz 32-bit processor running the Linux operating system. Parrot makes a few accessories, like a GPS sensor and a longer-lasting battery, and some hackers have figured out ways to attach additional devices, like environmental sensors.
Out of the box, the AR.Drone can be controlled by a smartphone app and piloted like a remote-controlled plane—but the real power is the ability to install your own software on the drone itself, allowing it to fly autonomously. When the students upload a specific set of instructions to the drone, it can fly off and perform specialized tasks on its own, reacting to what is sees and senses. “These are basically computers that can fly,” explained Lester.
The students started by installing node.js, a new software platform designed for building fast, scalable network applications in JavaScript, along with the node-ar-drone module. There is a growing community of developers writing and sharing open-source software modules for AR.drones; the I School Drone Lab is building on this foundation and sharing their own software modules with the community.
Not droning on
Working with drones first-hand has sparked the students’ imaginations for the non-military possibilities presented by drones. For several of them, the starting point was the March 2012 “launch” of TacoCopter.com, a drone-based service that purported to deliver fresh tacos to patrons who had ordered from their GPS-enabled smartphone. Although TacoCopter turned out be a hoax, automated food delivery is really just the tip of the iceberg.
“Our students are finding new and innovative ways to use the devices to do interesting things,” said professor Cheshire. “For example, can you get a quadcopter to pick up and deliver objects on demand? Can you program the device to recognize hand gestures and other motions, and then respond in various ways?”
“There are lots of uses for drones that people may not typically think of when they hear the term,” said Lester. His teammate Elliot Nahman, also a second-year MIMS student, agreed. “I’m particularly interested in strapping sensors to it,” said Nahman. “Maybe you can use it in building science, to gather temperature profiles across a very tall space. Or there’s the potential for pollution monitoring: you can fly around the city and gather pollution data that would otherwise be difficult to collect.”
This week, India announced an effort to protect the rare one-horned rhino from poachers by using drones to patrol the borders of the vast Kaziranga National Park. In additon, a recent TIME Magazine article listed dozens of socially beneficial applications of drones:
“In Costa Rica they’re used to study volcanoes. In Japan drones dust crops and track schools of tuna; emergency workers used one to survey the damage at Fukushima…. Farmers are already using drones to monitor their crops; a weekly overhead picture of a field can give them the information they need to use less chemicals and water on the plants, saving money and the environment. Scientists use drones for wildlife conservation, mapping the nests of endangered species without disturbing them. And energy companies use drones to monitor electric pylons and gas pipelines.”
“So far the list of applicants for permission to fly drones [in the U.S.] consists mostly of universities, public agencies and drone manufacturers,” reports TIME Magazine. “According to its FAA application, Washington State’s department of transportation wants to try using drones for avalanche control. The U.S. Department of Energy plans to use a helicopter drone to take air samples. The Forest Service wants drones to help fight fires.” In addition, delivery companies like FedEx have been salivating for years over the possibility of employing drones.
Legal and privacy concerns
The spread of drones has raised a number of new regulatory and policy questions, led by widespread concerns about privacy. The Drone Lab team is studying the legal and social implications of drones and thinking about policies that could balance the benefits of the technology with its potential dark side.
“Drones are likely to have a profound impact on the future, but right now they exist in a sort of legal gray zone,” said Dave Lester. Our current laws were mostly designed for a previous generation’s technology, and it’s not always clear how they apply to technological innovations.
“As a society, it’s important that we figure out how to deal with flying devices with cameras,” said professor Cheshire, whose research focuses on the social impacts of information technologies. “I’m pushing the students to think through the privacy implications of autonomous flying cameras, while also looking for more helpful and useful applications for them—such as wildlife management, event photography, and more.”
Regulation of drones is also concerned with the safety of the airways. Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forbids the commercial use of drones without specific authorization, although the FAA is working on new regulations to allow commercial drone flights by 2015.
Breaking the boundaries
The widespread availability of a drone that can be purchased—and programmed—by everyday people is a very recent breakthrough. At the moment, they’re primarily a high-end toy, “but the implications are potentially profound, in terms of how we interact with our environment, with other people, and with the world,” observed Dave Lester.
“Flying the drone lets me see the world from a new perspective, and hacking on it helps me understand how this technology can be a platform for creativity,” he said. “So many interesting applications are possible; it’s a very liberating personal technology.”
It’s remarkable how the MIT Hobby Shop presages aspects of the hackerspace movement…
In the 1937-38 academic year, Vannevar Bush, then Vice President of MIT, granted a group of 16 MIT students permission to use a room in the basement of building 2. With equipment they found around the Institute they set up a wood and metal shop in the 16-foot by 22-foot area. The club members chose the name “Hobby Shop” based on their belief in the philosophy that the well rounded individual pursued interests outside their profession – hobbies.
Now in its 75th year, we take a look back how the Hobby Shop began, and evolved to what it is today.
Going up? This is about as daring as I would get with my little v959, especially considering there were pretty significant wind gusts. This video does demonstrate a couple things. First, I can get a fairly good birds eye view of a neighborhood with a camera equipped quad. A better quad than my glorified toy could be a useful tool in post-disaster scene surveillance. Second, it is slightly difficult to see, but there is actually a visible squall line in the background at one point. Again, a higher quality quad could possibly be used to research weather. Things I think about while playing with my toy, and imagining my first "big boy" quad.
Posted by Gary Mortimer on April 17, 2013 at 11:00am
Patrick spoke with with Bryan Galusha at the recent Robotics block party and he had something to share with sUAS News.
We are excited to announce the Fighting Walrus fully-integrated RTF airframe! This ready-to-fly airframe incorporates the features what our customers wanted most:
1. Streaming 1080p video
2.Manual control with the iOS device
3. Low cost Ready-To-Fly kits
The RTF Airframe will integrate with the Fighting Walrus Radio to enable an unparalleled ground station experience. Video streams from the drone are geo-encoded and embedded into the iOS application, allowing users to monitor drone orientation and position while watching the video stream.
Posted by Daniel Chote on April 17, 2013 at 10:30am
I have been working on a fork of the Arduino IDE for use with the Pinocc.io project. With all the improvements I have made, it became my default go to for any Arduino code uploading, so it was inevitable that I would bake in ArduPilot HAL as well!
My current focus is on the OSX build, but I am fairly sure it will build alright on windows, probably wont look too great until I focus on that. I wanted to remove the ugliness from the IDE and improve the UX.
The main big thing that I added was the concept of "Workspaces", this allows you to maintain completely separate sketchbooks for each of the platforms. Right now I have them hardcoded, but I intend to make it configurable via a new preferences window I am about to start on. The workspaces currently are Arduino, Ardupilot and Pinoccio. These default to ~/Documents/{workspace name} such as ~/Document/Ardupilot.
I integrated the HAL classes that Pat Hickey worked on with the community fork of Arduino, and adapted them to work within the new 1.5.x setup. 1.5.x introduced platforms.txt, which makes the whole thing a lot simpler. The ArduPilot HAL menu is enabled if you select an ardupilot board from the boards menu. This allows you to build standard, or coreless for the HAL codebase. (just like the community fork does).
This is very much alpha quality code, I am no java developer, but apparently I am more of one than the original authors of the Arduino IDE ;)
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign developed new microbatteries out-powering even the best supercapacitors. These could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics, such as drones - the batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies!
"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now. We can reduce by a factor of 30 today's required size. Now we can think outside of the box. It's a new enabling technology. It's not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It's allowing us to do different, new things."
I have a thought to use cellular technology to pipe video and data over a UDP connection. This is nothing, however, I haven't seen a lot of support for the usage of 4G/LTE which allows up to 100mbps speeds. Has anyone ever read up on this pico board? I'ts available from min-box.com. The same place I received my mini-PC for my GCS.
I had this idea about hosting a UDP server on board the aircraft with this pico board. Then routing all traffic through a VPN tunnel where it will be connected to the GCS via internet/VPN tunneling.
The APM will connect to the board via serial I/O. The tricky part (for me) will be routing that serial traffic over a UDP connection. Any idea a simple(r) way to do this with Linux instead of any software-based routing procedures? I very familiar with Linux, just haven't done any network routing inside a client-only environment.
