After hard working for several months, we're finally able to announce the birth of a prototype of HeX
The hexagonal frames are made by a 3D printer. They cost us nearly 1300 USD.
All the components are successfully hidden inside of the centerpiece.
Allow us to show off a little bit from different angles. Yeah! We're a little overexcited!
There is not a great selection of decent 3 axis camera mounts for gopro sized cameras so I have started building my own. The first one will be a ‘nose mount’ and I may later consider a belly mount for quads etc. It will have one standard sized digital servo for roll and 2 micro sized ones. The belt drive gearing is to increase the rotation angle up to 280deg. All pivots will have deep groove ball bearings.
I hope to mould a thin carbon fibre cover for rain protection (it hasn’t stopped here for 6 months).
This will fit on the nose of the Holden UAV, which has now had many successful flights with an APM2. More of that
Microsoft and Arduino are normally worlds apart but on Friday of last week, ArduPlane was used as an example on "Channel 9". You can read the full article here
Today's Hardware Friday post. Oh yeah, that's some goodness...
Channel 9 is a Microsoft Blog
Drone article in January 2013 issue of Air & Space Smithsonian magazine. Lots of application info in this one.
Click HERE to read article.
I have just finished building a Multiplex Funjet. I have added the APM 2 in the Funjet.
The motor is a 2830 4000KV with a 40 A ESC.
6x4 prop
I am looking for any suggestions on setting up the PID’s. I see the Skyjet’s para file is in the download area.
Will this work on the Funjet ?
I would like to have the APM working nice before maddening the Funjet, because I know it is very fast.
Hi!
~1000 propellers was added to the database on last week.
You can search propellers using several filters, for example: material, length, pitch etc
Some items contains several propellers, for example: selected item contains 4 propellers.
price = 4.29, propellers: 4,
1 propeller $4.29/4 = $1.07
Welcome: www.rcdetails.info
One of the things I get asked most often about by the press is for examples of non-military, non-police use of drones. Part of our function here at DIY Drones is to educate the public about civilian and peaceful uses of drones, so I'm always happy to reel off some examples, from agriculture to Hollywood (aside from the main reason we do it here, which is education and fun). Atmel has also created a great list of "18 ways that drones are being used today", which illuminates how broad their non-military applications are.
But to make it easier to get the word out, I've started a repository of such uses, below. I'll link to this post from the front page of DIY Drones. Please add your own examples and suggestions (including categories I may have missed) in the comments, and I'll update the post to include them as they come in.
Examples of Non-Military, Non-Police use of Drones
Agriculture
Search and Rescue
Hollywood
Sports
Wildlife management
Science/Environment
News reporting
Real Estate
Mapping
Delivering Medicine
Human Rights Monitoring
Communications networks
And lots more in the comments below and at the DC Area Drone User group
From the Spring 2013 Course Schedule of New York University's ITP program:
Flying Robots
Flying robots, aka Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones, are growing in number and influence in military use. In parallel, the hobbyist community is developing DIY methods, making flying robots more accessible to more people. What is yet to become common is for these DIY aircraft to carry out visions rather than simply take pictures. This course aims to provide the conceptual and technical foundation for using flying robots for visionary purposes. Here, technology is the tool. The air vehicle is the paintbrush, the poster, the camera; visible to some degree but not the purpose. The first step is to strip down the employment of a flying robot to its essence, as a means to gather information or take action at a distance, using an autonomous agent. The group will discuss and expand the current thinking on feasible, worthy objectives for flying robots, from art to science, from observation to communication, from performance to activism. Throughout the course, these conceptual topics will be a backdrop for hands-on projects using accessible technology.
The projects will investigate:
• Performing a task with a flying robot
• Moving information and decision-making
• Making a craft fly autonomously
The projects will be performed in small teams and will require conceptualization, system design, and mechanical, electrical and coding work. The types of small aircraft could include quadcopters, blimps, planes, or less conventional platforms. Flight controls will be done using the Arduino-based ArduPlane and ArduCopter, or other embedded computing platforms. The online DIY/hobbyist community will be used as a resource. Each week, class will include a brief lecture and discussion followed by demonstration and debugging of projects.
The LA100 is priced at €990 (US$1,275) and will come ready to fly from December, 2012. Lehmann Aviation says it plans to roll out hardware and software upgrades for the LA100 on a regular basis.
I guess its all about PR :)
From Gizmag. Autolanding is easy with multicopters using ultrasound, but hard with planes, since ultrasound is too noisy. Maybe radar would be better?
Excerpt from the article:
Research based in Frankfurt, Germany, and funded by the European Union, has resulted in a new low-cost, fingernail-sized radar chip package that could be implemented in a variety of areas, including the automotive industry, robotics and smartphones.
The chip was developed under the “Silicon-based ultra-compact cost-efficient system design for mm-wave sensors” (or Success) consortium, and is believed to be the smallest complete silicon-based system-on-chip (SoC) device for radar able to operate at frequencies beyond 100 GHz.
“As far as I know, this is the smallest complete radar system in the world,” said Professor Christoph Scheytt, coordinator of the project on behalf of IHP Microelectronics in Frankfurt, Germany. “There are other chips working at frequencies beyond 100 GHz addressing radar sensing, but this is the highest level of integration that has ever been achieved in silicon.”
The chip package measures 8 x 8 mm (0.3 x 0.3 inches), operates at 120 GHz, and can calculate the distance of an object up to around 3 meters (10 feet) away, to an accuracy of within 1 mm. It can also detect moving objects, and their velocity, by using the Doppler effect.
From Wired Design, a story of a group of protesters who were able to buy a used Predator carrying container for $300 and turned it art piece to protest drones. Also, check out the picture at the bottom: similar UAV containers were used as props in the Avengers!
“He told me it would make a great koi pond,” said James Enos, recalling the dealer in obscure military surplus who did business, along with his dog, in one of the weedy fields around Ramona, California.
“It” was the original logistical container of an MQ-1 Predator Drone Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — the most prominent model of drone aircraft that is waging remote-controlled war on suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.
“He was a nice guy,” Enos remembered of the dealer who had posted the unusual offering on Craigslist, but was close-lipped about its origin in the murky military surplus community around San Diego. “All he would say was he got it at the port.”
The koi pond idea wasn’t a bad one, but Enos had other plans for the 27-foot-long fiberglass container with a hinged lid. The sides of the object still wore stickers announcing its original price — almost $18,000 — as well as its overseas destination and even the name of the U.S. military officer who took delivery of it in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The dealer wanted $300.
“I was always looking for large things,” said Enos, who said that he first figured the box would make good building material. As a co-director of The Periscope Project, an experimental architecture and design cooperative in San Diego, he was constantly in need of salvageable items to use in construction projects. He knew that a fiberglass object that large, vacuum-formed in the manner of a hot tub, had likely cost thousands of dollars to make. “I had to have it,” he said.
But Enos soon realized he had a bona fide readymade on his hands. The huge beige container was a powerful object, one that touched many worlds: the drone war, throwaway culture, the American military-industrial complex and its hold on San Diego, a city whose economy is driven by a weird blend of sunny-California tourism and lucrative government defense contracts.
It also symbolized the controversial, covert military strikes that the presidential candidates have been talking about (and, notably, not talking about) in the run-up to the election. Drones barely came up in the debates — Romney said, briefly, that he supported the President’s use of them — but they have become one of the most singular aspects of foreign policy under this administration, and there’s no sign that aggressive drone strikes will stop, no matter who wins the election on Tuesday.
Enos and his Periscope Project colleagues decided to turn the drone casing into a “threadbare mobile dwelling unit,” adding a reference to downtown San Diego’s housing crisis to its other layers of significance. (“Homeless people say to us, ‘I want to live in one of these. Is this a FEMA program?’” Enos told me.)
They took the container back to Periscope headquarters in a U-Haul truck and got to work. The first step was to take it apart. It swung open at the top; inside was a formed and padded tray that once cradled the drone precisely, and which Enos and team later turned into a bench.
“It had desiccant bags, like you get when you buy a pair of shoes, the size of loaves of bread,” Enos said.
Carefully, Enos and a handful of skilled volunteers installed fans in either end of the case, scraped out glue, and put in wooden platform floors and carpeting. They added built-in shelving and wired the unit for electricity. They cut the hinged lid so that the center part of the container can be propped open to the sky. Furnished this way, the drone “coffin” is like a camper without a motor (it still rolls on the ten-inch casters it came with). Working with found parts and donated labor, the team completed the conversion for under $1,000.
[Read more here]
“Hidden in plain sight”: crates of MQ-1 Predator drones, with orange plastic lids to spare the fiberglass, stacked up in a still from Joss Whedon’s 2012 superhero movie, The Avengers.
One awesome thing about the APM and FPV is the wind correction check box. When flying through these trees you have about two feet on each wing tip. Usually it's a pretty strong cross wind at the field as well. I've attempted with another stabilization unit, but it's no match..
2012-11-24 MV to All:
I've only just joined the ArduPilot-Mega Opensource Project, and am only just beginning to dig into the codebase.
My goal is to implement a host of enhancements to our beloved APM Mission Planner application.
My cloned repository is named "markevogt-pcl-experimenting".
My first enhancements have now been coded, tested and pushed up to my repo:
1. Flight Data Panel: each of the (6) quickView panels now has black text on a colored background - far easier to see when outside than thin, colored text against a black background;
2. Flight Data Panel: each of teh (6) quickView panels now has UNITS dynamically queried from the MainV2.config[] array, which in turn is dynamicall populated from the APM > Configuration screen. This too is handy when you wish to switch from feet to meters, or from fps to mph !...
Again, this is just a newbie way to start contributing swiftly - work on simple stuff to learn the overall codebase, then progressively tackle more complex enhancements.
Next up: adding the Mission Planner Screen's lovely (large) Zoom Slider control to the Flight Data Screen, so the act of zooming is consistent across The Application...
Feedback is welcome!
Cheers,
-MV
Revised Yellow FPV Plane with gyro stability system added, Worked best with analogue inputs from Murata piezo gyro sensors of a dead KK board filtered taking a 10 point average. Yaw compensation is currently not used as there is no rudder presently.
Gyro stability code in action
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrSxP9YsLpY&hd=1
The RX board using the Arduino Nano weighs 12 grams
Hiking Sweeney Ridge on Thanksgiving morning was a perfect time for testing out my newly completed quadcopter.
This spot in the mountains, 1200 feet over SFO and the Pacific ocean, seemed like a perfect place to test out my newly completed quadcopter and my newly acquired piloting skills. I've been spending hours and hours flying collective pitch helis in a simulator using a PPM-to-USB joystick adapter I built – trying to get past the heading-aligned flying I've done for years now. It's also the first outdoor flight of my new custom quadcopter and my first time with the KK2.0 flight controller too.
Parts list:
The frame is all carbon fiber: about 1.5 meters of 6mm square tube and two 60x60mm 0.5mm sheets epoxied together. The motors are mounted directly to the motors using zip ties (with hot-glue holding them from sliding off).
The battery mounts via velcro underneath (with an extra strap just to be safe). I built a modular camera attachment with some spare plastic pieces I had lying around from some cheap ikea curtain mounts. That's right.
Built / Design process
I picked out these motors for their weight/size/power and figured I could work around their idiotic peculiar design. I sketched out the design, computer modeled the specific dimensions I wanted, then measured everything out to a piece of cardboard (an insert from a new pack of t-shirts). Using foam tape to hold the carbon beams in place I used plastic weld epoxy to sandwich the plates on the top then the bottom.
I'm running with my 3 year old 10A plush ESCs that I reflashed to run tgy firmware. I built a friction-contact programmer out of some wire, a clamp, hot glue, and a servo horn. I wouldn't actually recommend doing this anymore, hobbyking sells these now (480Hz update rate out of the box) although I haven't tried them.
I'm really looking forward to the Drone Olympics, which will be held on Dec 1st at Groupon's offices in San Francisco. I'll be one of the judges.
Here's the description of the event:
Drone Olympics is a NodeCopter-Style programming competition powered by drones and JavaScript. Hackers will receive one Parrot AR Drone 2.0 so they can work on their project. Here is one of the drones in action. The day of the event hackers will get a chance to present their work to other attendees and judges. Judges will select the winner(s).
Looking forward to meeting many of you there!
This is an android application that converts your mobile into a GPS tracker for your RC. But you mobile into your plane, and let it fly, it will generate for you a KML file with flying path details. You can download it from here.
This is a demo of my foam plane
UAVDevBoard users:
We've got some new cool discounts on Multicopters, starting today through the end of the year!
LIST PRICE SALE PRICE
ArduCopter 3DR Hexa RTF + *FREE Replacement Kit (Crash Kit) $899.99 $765.00
ArduCopter 3DR Quad RTF +*FREE Replacement Kit (Crash Kit) $799.99 $599.99
ALSO JUST FOR THE WEEKEND!
PLUS! Save $50 OFF on Hexacopter Valid 11/22/2012 - 11/28/2012
Have a safe flight!
We're delighted to announce the new APM 2.5+, which is the same APM 2.5 board you know and love but surrounded by lots of new goodness! Now, for a new lower price of $179, it comes with all this, right out of the box:
Oh, and did I mention that we also lowered the price of APM 2.5 by $20 at the same time?? This is all thanks to our new production facilities in Tijuana, which allow us to make an increased volume of products at higher quality and lower prices. We're even adding a new Manncorp four-head pick-and-place machine there to handle even higher volume!
