Really needing a break I spent a little 'me time' in the workshop messing around with old scrappy parts and stuck this thing together :) It's using on of our older QU4D airframes with off cut tubes, old motors mounts and a set op serious MT3515 T-Motors used on our older octos + a MT2814 with a 9" prop for 'WARP DRIVE' forward propultion ;)
It flies fairly well and will go shoot a test flight and see what warp drive speeds we can hit, thanks caption Sulu!
lets see if I can prop hower it! lol
We went to see the new Tom Cruise film "Oblivion" last night, and it was an intresting story and twist.
The main charachter "Jack" was a Droid engineer repairing the Droids when ever they go broken or shot at etc.
This was an ok scenario but later when you find out they were actually there to kill any human, then this whole current debate about Droids becomes starkly a reality, and will spread the paranoia for our hobby.
The other day i was flying my quad and some people came across and asked is that a Droid, i had to say no even though in German it is the correct word for what it is, and i had to say no a type of Helicopter. They went away happier, but then noticed the camera on board, and looked at me a bit puzzled.
I really think we need a name change from DIY Drones to DIY Aerial Platforms ??
Eric Cheng has some nice photos and notes of the first SF Drones meeting. The theme was FPV. Robert Seidel gave a presentation on what he's been doing with real time video stabilization and object tracking, Andreas demonstrated how his might Zii is set up for video (and literally almost blew some guitars off the wall demonstrating the propulsion system), and I showed a couple of options for video systems and transmitters.
Okay, so this flight was not nearly as daring as I may have sold it to be, but it is my first flight over water. Knowing water and electronics don't mix, I was a bit nervous.
This flight made me realize a few things. First, I want a bigger quad. Second, I would probably treat a bigger quad with kid gloves. Third, I really really really want a lightweight FPV setup for this little V959 quad. And D, errr...fourth...YouTube can really botch videos at times. I may have to move over to vimeo.
So, my thoughts beg questions. What bigger quad should I buy, or build, next? One I can thrash a bit, and not bring down the wrath of the wife in the initial expenditure and upkeep? Also, one which preferably would carry a GoPro in its protective case, as I am getting a hand-me-down GoPro cheap from a friend moving over to Contour cameras. Next, what light weight FPV setup would people recommend? I can carry about 50 grams extra on my current quad. I have been looking at the Walkera all in one camera and transmitter setup which can be purchased for their micro quads, because I know size-wise they would work. Any other suggestions though? Finally, what are peoples thoughts on Vimeo? I have heard mixed thoughts elsewhere.
I'd like to preface this post with this statement: I love my (lab's) Udrones Hexa C, but I feel that this simple fix would save a lot of grief for Udrones flyers.
So! I have noticed that the Udrones Hexa C that I use has a nasty habit of vibrating its motor mounting screws loose. Twice before, I have landed my hexa only to find that one of the motors was dangling by one screw, because the other had vibrated loose. Well this time it finally happened! During the landing sequence from 80m, the rear left motor came unscrewed and hit the arm, flying off.
Here's the sequence of events:
18:25:45: Hexa is returning to launch. I notice the it sounds rattle-y. I've heard that sound before, it means that a motor has lost a screw. Since it was already about to land, I let it continue. Landing sequence commences at 80m above home.
18:26:06: Motor comes off at 55 meters. At this point, the copter stays airborn but cannot stay in one spot. Missing one motor, it yaws at a good rate, making manual flight very very difficult. I can't compensate for the yaw, because it makes the copter tip over.
18:26:18: At this point the height reading in the tlog says that the copter very nearly touched the ground. I can assure you it did not, I was trying to get control of it in the air, no lower than 20m at the very least. At this point I was deathly afraid of the copter landing on a roof, or much worse: the pool. I attempted to stear it towards the safest place I knews, the forest.
18:26:37: Not quite reaching the forest, the copter is flying over the tennis courts at a frightening clip. The telemetry says it was underground at this point, but I assure you it was about 20-30m up.
18:26:46: At this point I am still trying to hit the forest but barely miss it. At this point I am running through the tennis courts. I see that the copter is going towards a medium sized road. Under no circumstance do I want the copter to crash anywhere near moving cars, it would be dangerous to everyone involved. So I lowered the throttle until the copter entered a descent.
18:27:01: From my point of view, the copter vanishes behind a stand of trees, still descending. I give it two seconds, and then cut the throttle completely.
18:27:04: Impact. From that point, I dash over and am immensely relieved to see that the copter landed upright on a grassy field with nothing broken beyond the missing motor and a chipped prop. I went back to the launch site and recovered the top half of the motor, complete with propeller still attached. The bottom half of the motor was still dangling from the copter, its mount cracked.
The moral of the story is: apply threadlock to your motor mounts, and check them before every flight! Otherwise the screws will vibrate loose and possibly detach your motor. I urge Udrones to add threadlock to the motor mounting screws of their ARF copters.
Please welcome ArduinoDroid - Arduino IDE for Android.
Blog: http://arduinodroid.blogspot.com
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.antonsmirnov.android.arduinodroid
A flight time of 42 minutes all hands off around the cube, a wonderful entry from Steve Westerfield.
I did a practice flight near my house with a few seconds at each corner and then I went out and did 3 missions on Mar 26th at my RC flying field Falcon R/C in Lake Dallas,TX. The first was 15 mins and it flew well. I increased the WP times for a 30 minute flight and it went well also. The next attempt was for 45 minutes with at least 3 minutes in each corner but I didn't quite have enough battery. Looked like 41 to 42 minutes would be about it. I went out again on the 5th of April and got a good 42 minute flight. A total of 23 waypoints were used to get each corner and to turn to a heading which faced to the inside of the box.The minimum time at any corner was 196 seconds with many corners having 294 second waits. Any AQ should be able to fly a correctly programmed mission so hopefully bonus points for time will make the difference in winning with the added risk that it has more time to wander around.
Read his full report and enjoy the other entries here
Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the U.S. Geological Survey will work together to evaluate whether a small unmanned aircraft can save state wildlife managers time, money and offer a safer and enhanced alternative to gather greater sage-grouse data.
During the media-only event, a USGS crew will field launch the aircraft and media will have the opportunity to take photos, video and get a first-hand look at the system.
Representatives from Colorado Parks and Wildlife, the USGS, and the Bureau of Land Management will be available for interviews.
When: Friday, April 12 – 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. (Please be punctual)
Where: Kremmling, Colo.
Please consider:
How to participate: By 5 p.m. Thursday, April 11, please confirm your attendance with one of the Media Points of Contact:
Following on my earlier blog post of "What a phantom should look like inside" here http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/what-a-phantom-should-look-like-inside
is a 'What a phantom SHOULD fly like' quick video.
A quick first fun flight with the 'ArduPhantom' we ripped out the Naza and installed the APM2.5 and it's really a completely different drone, now it actually goes where you want it to, and quickly :) We did a few flips, rolls, fast flying and had so much fun we had one or two crashes ;) Not to mentioned all the other advance features it now has.
We are not trying to promote the atual phantom here rather the amazing ArduCopter Code and the Flight Controller :)
'ArduCopter Phantom' What a phantom should fly like from SteadiDrone on Vimeo.
The evolution of the code, the improvements made by the development team and the passion that we are putting in all this public project is bearing fruits that much hoped for.
ArduCopter is reaching commercial products, offers even more potential at an affordable cost.
Roberto Navoni and Emile Castelnuovo by "Virtualrobotix Italia" was the pionieer of ARM platform for ArduCopter code with the powerfull “VR Brain” (in this video), the new “PX4” now ranks at the same level but delayed on the roadmap, although we are almost ready for the first official stable release, i will start my hard test this week.
This blog post is dedicated to people, like me, using heart and mind for this passion, and this video to Leonard for making Acro mode much better!
Just to say thanks to whole “ArduCopter Dev Team”, DIY Drone community, “3DRobotics”, “Virtualrobotix Italia” and all those who like me are following this project with the right spirit, that of fun and sharing experience… enjoy with ArduCopter!
Bests... Marco
-= ArduCopter Dev Team =-
https://www.facebook.com/marcouav
http://diydrones.com/profile/marco67
If you have looked at my previous posts (and if you have not, why not?), you will know I have a v959 camera quad with built in camera. The camera is not HD, but does do 60fps recording, and is mounted in such a way to reduce vibration. You will also know I recently bought an inexpensive HD camera similar to a GoPro. Finally, you would know I decided to mount the new camera to the quad in an attempt to do some HD aerial video. Here I present, my first HD aerial video. It has terrible jello, and I have a long way to go, but every journey begins with a first step. This whole setup so far is still less than a hundred bucks invested.
Two years after the March 11th tsunami in Japan that triggered the Nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant, there are still just over 300 thousand people who have not been able to return to their homes due to high radiation levels. The government has decided that radiation levels must be below 1 micro sieverts/hour (=5mSv/year, see here for what this means) before children can return to school in the area (adults may return to their home at 1.9micro-sieverts/hour, 10mSv/year) and there is a building-by-building clean-up effort that is going on to try and get the radiation levels down to the required levels.
The radiation levels are being measured from manned helicopters flying at approximately 300m but the issue is that the ground level where people actually live can only be estimated roughly from the air. To get the more accurate "human level" readings the government is relying on mobile surveying trucks or individuals wearing protective clothing but there has also been some limited use of UAVs.
In particular the very top image was taken at the Yamakiya elementary school (40km from the plant) using the Chiba University's MiniSurveyor hexacopter outfitted with a geiger counter. The readings were performed twice, once back in August 2012 and then again in December.
What you can see is that over the 4 months that significant portions of the school ground has returned to near natural levels and the part of the ground that was high radiation (2 ~ 3 micro-sieverts/hour) has mostly fallen to 1~2 micro-sieverts/hour. This area, by the way, is where the top few cm of earth from the school playground was removed and placed in the middle of the ground and covered by a plastic sheet.
During this test an EBA Japan Hyper-spectral camera was also used (although, in fact it was mounted on a manned helicopter mostly because it weighs 2kg and the mini-surveyor was perhaps unable to lift that weight for an extended period). These sorts of cameras can produce an image broken down into hundreds of bands of bands of light which can be used to determine what surface the radiation has fallen on. This is important because the level of radiation remaining at a site is greatly determined by the surface. For example it has been found that different types of trees retain radiation differently. A cedar will retain 50% of the radiation within it's leaves while an oak will only retain 20% (the rest falls to the ground).
After the clean-up is done, having a UAV capable of travelling over all the various different surfaces and verifying the success of the effort is another good use that's been put forward.
The Mini-surveyor was developed under the guidance of Professor Nonami (who wrote this book). It costs about about $15k each including a fancy simulator for learning how to use it. It apparently uses a "physical model" instead of PID controllers for attitude control. You can see a video of it flying here.
Today I share with you my experience after four years of trial and error with APM, and managed to optimize my skywalker as UAV for photogrammetry, is a team of professional results for less than 4k USD, APM is a great platform for autopilot dornes developed for different applications at the beginning is a bit confusing and frustrating but then you start to see the benefits of this open source autopilot. georeferencing tools like pictures (control + F) is very useful for a good result.
my drone is equipped with:
skywalker 1900
motor : scorpion 1100
camera: samsumg nx200 lens 20mm
LRS : dragon link
radio : futaba 12fg
camera video : gopro3
modem: maxstream xt9
APM 2.5
Here are other examples
Tested The Following Solutions:
Watch the video to find out which is the winner!
At the University of Michigan on Wednesday, researchers for Darpa announced they’d created a very small chip containing a timing and inertial measurement unit, or TIMU, that’s as thick as a couple human hairs. When the satellites we rely on for navigation can’t be reached — whether they’ve been jammed or you’re in a densely packed city — the chip contains everything you’ll need to figure out how to get from place to place. It’s got gyroscopes, accelerometers and a master clock, to calculate orientation, acceleration and time.
Read complete article at: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/darpa-navigation/
3D Robotics is the leading open source unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology company. We design and manufacture autopilot electronics and autonomous ready-to-fly aerial vehicles, including multicopters and airplanes. Our headquarters are in San Diego and our manufacturing activities are based in Tijuana, Mexico.
We are recruiting for a Controller, to be based in our San Diego office.
RESPONSIBILITIES AND DUTIES:
REQUIRED EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS:
TO APPLY:
To design a low-cost unmanned aerial vehicle which helps to select the maize varieties which are best adapted to adverse environmental conditions is the main objective of an international project led by Josep Lluís Araus, professor from the Department of Plant Biology of the UB and head of the Consolidated Research Group on Ecophysiology of Mediterranean Agriculture. Nowadays, constraints in phenotyping capability limit our ability to dissect the genetics of quantitative traits, especially those related to harvestable yield and stress tolerance. In particular, phenotyping under real environmental conditions remains the bottleneck for future breeding advances.
The first prototype of the aerial platform was handed in February to people in charge of the South Africa Office of CIMMYT, in Harare (Zimbabwe).
To improve maize yields
Skywalker is a complex aerial phenotyping platform, a remote-controlled plane provided with an advance flight system which do not require previous knowledge of aeromodelism. Spectral (visible and near infrared) reflectance and thermal imagery cameras were fitted to the wings; they allow evaluating crops’ growth, temperature and available soil water of large numbers of maize varieties in only a few minutes. This data will be used to improve the efficiency of maize breeding and speed up the development of drought and low nitrogen tolerant maize varieties for some of the poorest farmers in the world.
The plane ranges from 30 to 45 minutes, and can fly at over fly at over 600-meter with an average speed of 45 kilometres per hour. Take-off and landing, as well as flight plan (way, height, etc.), can be automatically programmed previously.
Skywalker: prototype’s first flight in Zimbabwe
The project, founded by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), has the collaboration of the company Airelectronics —which designed the flight control system and installed sensors on the plane— and the Teledetection Group of the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture of CSIC, in Córdoba, responsible for selecting platform’s sensors and the software to transfer and process information data.
The first prototype of the aerial platform was handed in February to people in charge of the South Africa Office of CIMMYT, in Harare (Zimbabwe), when Professor Josep Lluís Araus, Antón Hernández, president from the company Airelectronics, and Alberto Homero, technician from the group led by Pablo J. Zarco Tejada at the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, were making a stay there. The researcher Jill Cairns, expert on maize physiology at CIMMYT, coordinated the field-test of the platform. The experts, who also visited Zimbabwe’s Crop Breeding Institute (CBI), provided local technicians with theoretical and practical training to guarantee the maximum output of this new idea. It is planned to hand a second platform to Peru’s National Institute for Agronomic Research (INIA).
http://www.ub.edu/web/ub/en/menu_eines/noticies/2013/04/006.html
Two days ago the DC Area Drone User Group met with senate and congressional staff members as part of AUVSI Hill Day to let them know about the concerns of the small drone operator community. Watch the video above for an on-the-spot report of our experiences, as well as suggestions for how you can help ensure that new laws and regulations don't stifle our activities.
We encourage you to reach out to your members of congress about these issues. Urge them to push the FAA to meet the congressionally mandated deadline of 2015 for integrating drones into the U.S. airspace and ensure that the new regulations are friendly to small operators and small businesses. Click here for the talking points we used, which may be helpful for your conversations. AUVSI also has resources on its advocacy page here that contain additional information for tracking what is going on with the laws surrounding drone use.
Let's make sure our voices are heard! Big businesses are heavily engaged in the rule making process. Let's work together to ensure that the concerns of the small operator are also taken into account at this critical time.
Last year I released Windsock iPhone app which has the ability to instantly provide current wind forecast information on demand for almost anywhere in the world for a number of sites and can provide a forecast every 3 hours for the next 5 days ahead.
The idea behind it is that you have 3 or 4 flying sites you visit and you see at a quick glance which site is the best to go to. Also you can see forecasts so you can plan when the best time is to go to the field when it's calmest. It was a great success and now I'm thinking of adding some more features to it. Do you have any suggestions you'd like to see in the app? I've been thinking reporting the temperature and wind chill would be useful as well as the weather and sunrise/sunset but also using this data to just highlight when the best time slots are to go flying. Would condition alarms be useful or just annoying?
Would accessing your sites online through the website be something you'd find useful too? I also wondered about adding 'friends' to it and allowing you to check in to a particular site so your flying partners could join you but do people tend to fly solo or in groups or at clubs? I'm also adding a dedicated map view in the next version so please let me know what you'd like to see.
My inexpensive starter quad (click here for my post about it) comes with a built in standard definition 60fps camera. The whole package, being less than $70, is a great buy, but the lack of high definition is slightly disappointing. I have been looking for a lightweight high definition camera to mount instead. I considered a key chain camera, but while at a discount store the other day, I found the Emerson HD Action Camera.
It is a high definition GoPro-esque camera which records 720p high definition, at 30fps. It was about $35, so not much more expensive than the better high definition key chain cameras, and I wouldn't have to wait for shipping. Knowing the store I was buying from has a good return policy (even on damaged items) I decided to give it a try. I stopped by to pick one up on my way home from work yesterday. I will review the camera at a later time, but for now, back to my story.
I stripped it down to its circuit board, which I put into a padded anti-static package, cut a hole in it for the lens, and rubber band mounted the whole thing to my quad. It worked! It was lightweight enough to fly, and actually gave a little more stability to the quad by hanging a little extra weight below the center of gravity. I flew it around the house last night, and have some wonderful video of my walls, but didn't have a chance to get it outside before the sun went down. Today, by the time I made it home from work, we had a storm moving in, and there was a literal calm before said storm. Winds were only between about 3 and 5mph, so I decided to drag my new high def setup quad out, and take some aerial shots of the storm front. I am an amateur meteorologist, so this type of shot is something I have actually been interested in with aerial photography.
I got the quad up about 65 feet, started doing some pans of the horizon, fought some wind gusts, decided I had at least a few good shots, and brought it down just as the wind gusted up to about 25mph. Excited, I go into the house, pull the SD card, put it into my computer, pull up the video, and...I have a wonderful shot of me looking at the camera, adjusting it a little, and then...nothing. I somehow bumped the record button on the camera while making sure it was secure, and turned the darn thing off! ARGH! Even in my makeshift packaging, I can see the LED blinking when it records, and could have easily checked to make sure it was recording before sending my quad up on its dangerous mission. BUT, in my haste, I did not do the final check, and lost out on what I am sure would have been award winning aerial video footage of a storm front. OK, that may be going a little far, but still, it could have been cool. Maybe next time.
