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Hi all,

Maybe an idea for revision E of the 3DR Hexa?

After having played for some time with my 3DR Quad, I decided to make some changes. Actually, I wanted a hexa for more lifting power. And I was inspired by the guys from Team Blacksheep and their awesome FPV platforms. So I wanted a 'low-rise' Hexa with not too many stacked plates.

What to do? I bought a complete second 3DR Quad frame including motors, and when you add them together... you can build a Hexa AND you are left with some spare parts! 2 spare motors etc. which is great!

As you can see, it's really based on 2 Quad Base plates stuck together by an undermounted Quad arm/leg.

(OK, I had another extra black arm lying around). This also allows for perfect mounting of the small and lightweight HK Pan/Tilt GoPro camera gimbal.

Here's what it looks like, and below a test video (1:12mins) which was it's maiden voyage! I was a bit worried about stability, but it was amazingly stable (using APM 2.8.1)

Let me know what you think! As you can see, it's pretty slim!

After more than five years of experimentation the comunity of VirtualRobotix decided to grow up and turn into a cooperative company.
In the coming months in Italy, you can use our drones not only for scientific or fun, but also for commercial purposes.
Within VirtualRobotix we have assembled the best Italian companies with the ability to develop drones, very appasionate and expertise, today I present to you, the first professional product: a frame  in full carbon developed by the group that designs SpecialDrones.

In these video is possible to see different configuration , and the advanced application where our frame can do great performances

Now is possible to buy this frame for develop professional drone , we are searching partner to promote it worldwide.

for more info contact info@virtualrobotix.com

original blog post : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/virtualrobotix-start-to-develop-professional-component-for-intern

Yesterday I had my third fly with ardupilot on my X8 and is anded badly.

In about 3 seconds after start engine stopped and I lost control totally.

Due to small roll and pitch angle my X8  kept flying and crashed in a tree in 300 meters.

Later at home I discovered that connector on a power module on the battery side came off from the wire. Terminals inside the connector had almost no trace of solder. On the wire solder attended and was highly oxidized!!!!

This means that the soldering kept on heat shrink tubing, and water has entered inside accident was only a matter of time and vibration, which is what happened.

I also cut tube from another wire and soldering quality on it also leave much to be desired.

Fortunately the aircraft be restored by the end of the week I will raise it again in the air (It amazingly strong!).

However, I will now have to check all the areas of factory soldering.

Yes, finaly there is some progress on my quadcopter project.

First of all I spended to much time playing with my little Mini-H-Quad project. If you wan't to see some FPV recordings from a the Fatshark predator v2 set then watch my blog on http://wipo-minihcopter.blogspot.be/

But now the real stuf. I have loaded the arducopter firmware v2.5.3 on to my seeeduino mega 1280 board. I added some code to let it work with the Razor 9 DOF imu. I use a lantronix wifi module for telemetry and a usb gamepad to control the quad via my laptop. Currently I have done only some basics tests. Motors arm/spin/disarm and IMU motion check. The next step (next blog) is PID tuning. Watch it on my other blog: http://wipo-quadrocopter.blogspot.be/

Hereby my project, I wanted to build a quadrocopter to learn more about system control and brushless motor and because it is cool. To target also was to make it without as little wires as possible and that is why I made a stacked PCB setup. Made two PCB's one flightcontroller with a lot of possibilities to expand in the future (for instance two PIC32 and also place for MPU-9150).  And one PCB with 4 ESC's integrated and battery current measurement, still have to do a lot things (first thing is altitude control). For me it is just a learning experience (programming is not my strongest point). Hope you like it.

Flightcontroller with PIC32

• 400Hz angle and speed control
• 2S to 5S
• MPU-6050
• HMC5883L
• MS5611
• GPS
• SD
• Spektrum
• Telemetry (Wi.232, will be replaced by RFM22 in the future)
• PC control (Labview)
• Servo outputs
• The possibilty to make bode plots of the quad (looks like this)

dsESC4

• dsPIC33FJ
• 12A per ESC without cooling, (has to be tested more with thermal camera)
• 2S to 5S
• Current limiting
• Closeloop RPM
• Battery current sensor
• I2C
• SPI
• UART

Todo:

• Altitude control
• GPS position control
• Making it autonomously
• Vision control
• Camera gimbal
• ....

"Not just weapons of destruction: How drones are being used to help build the skyscrapers of the future which could house more than 30,000 people"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2279868/Not-just-weapons-destruction-How-drones-used-build-skyscrapers-future-house-30-000-people.html

Nice to see...

On the APM developer mailing list, the team recently posted their software roadmaps. Everyone is welcome to join the dev list themselves and follow this, but for those who aren't already signed up, I thought I'd post them here. 

As most of you know, the big recent leap has been full ArduPlane support for the 32-bit PX4 autopilot board, which is now complete and we'll talk about more soon. But in the meantime, here's the ArduPlane software near term to-do list, from team lead Andrew Tridgell:

As long as everyone understands that roadmaps tend to change, then I'm
happy to give an outline of the development that I'm aiming for over the
next few months.

It really divides into 3 categories:

 - vehicle specific changes (plane, rover, copter)

 - board specific changes (APM1/APM2/px4/vrbrain)

 - platform changes (basic system capabilities, build, libraries etc)

Within each category we have various people who 'own' the category. For
example, Randy is the ArduCopter lead, so he has some goals for the
vehicle specific components of ArduCopter. Randy has posted a nice
roadmap of what he is working on there.

For the platform and board changes, in the short term we want to get a
number of things fixed up so that px4 is a really good basis for
development. That means changes to the build system to make it easy to
do development on Windows, plus adding support for high rate logging to
the sdcard, both of "flash" logs and of telemetry style logs.

We also have a lot of docs to write on how people can use px4, how to
set it up, how to flash new firmware etc. Heaps to do there.

After that I'd like us to start taking advantage of the power of the
px4. For example, I think it would be great to be able to choose to use
the PX4 Kalman filter that James has been working on, and also use the
PX4FLOW board for highly accurate positioning. That will require some
restructuring of our library APIs, either within the AHRS framework, or
as a new library.

I also want to continue the process of library cleanup and consolidation
that we have been doing for a long time now. A good example is the new
AP_Mission library that Brandon has done. That library will allow us to
move a lot of mission logic into a common library, which lowers
maintainence costs and makes plane/rover/copter more consistent.

Similarly I would like to move a lot of what is now in GCS_MAVLink.pde
to a library shared by copter/plane/rover, so maintainence costs are
lower and improvements affect all 3 vehicle types.

A really big goal for me is to introduce a scripting layer into the core
autopilot, as an alternative to the current very simple mission
system. It seems likely at this stage that the scripting layer would be
based on pymite (a lightweight python implementation). It would only be
available on our ARM ports (not on APM1 and APM2) as the AVR doesn't
have enough memory to support it.

The scripting layer would allow for users to write simple or complex
scripts to control their vehicles, giving much better control over their
autonomous behaviour than we have now.

While all this is going on we also have the day-to-day process of bug
fixes and accepting patches and small enhancements.

For the rover code, I've been slowly working to cleanup the core rover
code to be a good basis for future development. That has taken much
longer than I hoped it would, but I would like to get a decent release
out soon.

In the plane code we have a number of interesting things pending,
including navigation improvements. Longer term I really want to get 4DT
path planning and sense-and-avoid capabilities.

I hope this gives you a bit of an idea of how I see things going. I'm
sure I've left some major things out, so please ask if your favouite
pending feature isn't listed.

You may also notice that I haven't put dates on things. That is
deliberate, as one of the things that is certain about software
development is that dates are always wrong!

On the APM developer mailing list, the team recently posted their software roadmaps. Everyone is welcome to join the dev list themselves and follow this, but for those who aren't already signed up, I thought I'd post them here. 

As most of you know, the big recent leap has been full ArduCopter support for the 32-bit PX4 autopilot board, which is now complete and we'll talk about more soon. But in the meantime, here's the ArduCopter software near term to-do list, from team lead Randy Mackay (some of these are already in ArduCopter 2.9.2, which is in beta testing and will be released soon)

• inertial navigation for loiter and waypoints
• compensation for motor interference of compass that leads to heading inaccuracy
• limits (aka geofencing) rework to make more reliable and use less memory
• px4 support
• bug fixes and small enhancements including:
  • single channel failsafe detection
  • make smoother throttle transition from manual <-> auto flight modes
  • rssi pin
  • user controlled yaw-behaviour parameter for auto missions
  • auto loiter command fix-up (ignoring altitude provided by user)
  • auto ignoring altitude as requirements for completing a waypoint
  • CH6 doesn't work for tuning when gimbal is enabled
  • waypoints don't output in dataflash like on arduplane meaning you can't see the waypoints in goggle earth
  • fix flip code
  • i2c sonar
  • do_jump is broken
  • fix hil
  • send failsafe message to ground station

Personally I don't plan more than about 1~2 months ahead because priorities change and because team members are mostly free to work on what interest's them so you end up with happy surprises while also having issues that don't get solved for a long time (especially lower priority items).

The Economist on the positive potential of civilian drones (via Business Insider):

WHENEVER a hiker gets lost in Mesa County, a rugged area in western Colorado, Benjamin Miller of the local police force does not bother to join the search on foot.

His department is a trailblazer in the use of unmanned aircraft, and he launches a drone equipped with an infrared camera to search from the skies. No wayward ramblers have been rescued in this way yet, but he hopes to find one soon.

Drones are best known for their role in the Afghan war, where they both monitor and strike at enemy forces. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered to find a way to integrate them into American airspace by 2015. The attraction of drones for domestic users is their ability to carry sensors, such as cameras and spectrometers, rather than weapons. This suggests they could be useful in commerce and research, as well as policing. Already scores of organisations have received special approval from the FAA to fly drones. Although there is no regularly updated master list in the public domain, organisations that have received permission range from universities in North Dakota and Michigan to the Departments of Agriculture and Energy. A number are police departments, and it is this development that is stirring up concerns about privacy and protests from local residents.

Their fears are centred on the prospect of surveillance. Since drones can be far cheaper to buy than helicopters--tens of thousands of dollars, as against a few million--the worry is that cameras will be sent up into the sky far more frequently. Even if they are not on a deliberate spy mission, they may capture incidental footage that leads to an investigation, such as evidence of marijuana plantations. Still, at least in Mesa County, the drones have been used for search and rescue efforts and photographing crime scenes. "We're not spying on everybody," says Mr Miller. "We haven't done a single surveillance mission."

In any case, it may not be so easy for a police department to perform round-the-clock surveillance. Their drones are much less sophisticated than military types like Predators, which can remain aloft for 40 hours at a height of 25,000 feet or 8,000 metres (although the Department of Homeland Security has purchased ten Reapers, a new version of the Predator, for border patrols.) The FAA specifies that drones used by public-safety agencies must weigh 4.4lb (2 kilograms) or less, which can be increased to 25lb if the operator is judged proficient. And they are governed by strict rules in the air. They cannot fly higher than 400 feet and must remain within the line of sight of the operator.

Some police forces, however, face obstacles. Florida lawmakers have proposed limiting their use in the state. And in Seattle, two drones that were bought in 2010 for police use have never gone into service. After a hullabaloo, the mayor announced that the programme was to be scrapped. It will soon be easier for police forces to have more eyes in the sky, but first they will have to win over a hostile public.

Read more: 

I've got no idea what this short film is supposed to be about, but if you'd like to see more drones with your bikinis (or the other way around), it's just three minutes long.

(Via BoingBoing)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-15/amazon-sells-out-predator-drone-toy-after-mocking-reviews.html

Federal authorities step up efforts to license surveillance aircraft for law enforcement and other uses, amid growing privacy concerns.

Article at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-domestic-drones-20130216,0,3374671.story

I Have inserted the starting pass at a much needed section on Vibration Control in the ArduCopter Wiki and would very much like feedback for corrections or additions from you all.

This is  the close coupled mount that I use on my little F330 Flamewheel.

To achieve this plus and minus one tenth G vibration dampening.

In any case, please review the Vibration Control Wiki section under Assembly and give me some (constructive) feedback.

Thank You,

Gary McCray

There have been infrared-guided toy helis before, but they've never worked very well. Perhaps this new one from AirHogs, with a cage to protect the prop, will work better.

From Gizmag:

There are plenty of remote-control micro helicopters that are operated via a smartphone app or a dedicated control unit, and even one that’s controlled by the user’s brain, but Air Hogs has come up with yet another approach. The company’s soon-to-be-released AtmoSphere chopper moves in response to the proximity of the user’s hand.

The AtmoSphere has an infrared sensor on the bottom, that is able to detect solid surfaces up to six inches (152 mm) below the helicopter. When an object (such as a hand) is detected, the aircraft stops and hovers in place. If that object comes closer, the AtmoSphere responds by moving up. It can additionally be moved sideways, simply by pushing gently against its sides.

There’s also an autonomous mode, it which it will move about on its own – the cage surrounding its rotor blades should allow it to bump against ceilings and walls without getting damaged.

Recharging is conducted by placing the helicopter in a small charging cradle, that requires six AA batteries – there’s no word on run time.

The AtmoSphere should be available sometime this year, priced at US$24.99.

Another cool plug-and-play EDA tool with circuit template library for EagleCAD - thanks to open XML (aforementioned)

From HackEDA via DangerousPrototypes

Excirpt from NYT:  They can record video images and produce heat maps. They can be used to track fleeing criminals, stranded hikers — or just as easily, political protesters. And for strapped police departments, they are more affordable than helicopters.

Read article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/technology/rise-of-drones-in-us-spurs-efforts-to-limit-uses.html

Raffaello D'Andrea at Zurich Minds:

I just started a new project in  building a new quad frame for under $10. I started with 2" black PVC pipe and .75" white PVC. Cut all the parts to 18" and the legs at 5.5". I could use some suggestions on how to mount the motors. I have a old x525 with the aluminum motor mounts. I have run wire though the arms and will start to put the APM  and power board in.

From Jason Kottke:

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG ruminates on optical calibration targets, weird landscape relics scattered across military bases made to check the resolution of cold war era photograph-snapping spy planes. You can find one target on Google Maps here.

"Although I am truly fascinated by what sorts of optical landmarks might yet be developed for field-testing the optical capabilities of drones, as if the world might soon be peppered with opthalmic infrastructure for self-training autonomous machines, it is also quite intriguing to realize that these calibration targets are, in effect, ruins, obsolete sensory hold-overs from an earlier age of film-based cameras and less-powerful lenses. Calibrating nothing, they are now just curious emblems of a previous generation of surveillance technology, robot-readable hieroglyphs whose machines have all moved on."

Are you in the DC area and interested in building your own drone? Due to popular demand, the DC Area Drone User Group is bringing back the guided build event at Nova Labs. Robot expert Christopher will provide a presentation on how to assemble a drone from a kit as well as mentorship while you work on your first drone build with other members of our community. This is a great way for people who are new to the world of drones to get started with their own equipment. More experienced builders are welcome to come as well to assemble new kits or upgrade existing equipment. We hope to see you there.