Blogs

Hi everyone!

I'm not affiliated with the OpenPilot project, but I figured it couldn't hurt to spread the knowledge - the OpenPilot Revolution ('Revo') platform is available for a limited time (orders close on November 5th).

The Revo is a very capable flight controller, based on the STM32F4 MCU, with a great IMU, built-in telemetry radio and a 5hz GPS.

I suggest you head on to http://www.openpilot.org for more information, but the basic costs are under 200$ for a complete kit (flight controller with onboard radio and GPS + ground station radio module).

I was looking for a light weight good quality camera for Quadrotor FPV and came up with this solution from china got immediate  reply from sales it is just 120$(sensor board+wifi+lens) 

Complete accessories and price list is here ipcam.PDF

And product is listed at

http://sz-going.en.alibaba.com/product/663818610-213093769/5_megapixel_cctv_camera_module_ip_digital.html?edm_src=sys&edm_type=fdbk&edm_grp=0&edm_cta=read_msg&edm_time=realtime&edm_ver=e

Never purchased anything from china before so little bit scared for loosing my money However if this device really have all these specs then it is a great replacement for costly Go-Pro,What do you say???

Out now. Apparently the big improvements are in 3D imagery (Austin shown above). More details at the Google Earth blog here. 

Starts in one hours time, 2000 GMT (subject to me getting my sums wrong the countdown has started on the timer)

During the episode, we will broadcast live from a SAR training event being instructed by our co host Gene Robinson. Our guest is Chris Onions. He works full time for Rescue 3 (UK) providing training to the emergency services in water and rope rescue in North Wales.

This event represents another historic first coming to you from the sUAS News.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/suasnews/2012/10/31/field-sar-training-using-unmanned-aircraft

Its been a headline week for our weekly podcast, over 100,000 total downloads. Not as spectacular as the numbers for here but it makes us warm and fuzzy!

To catch up with previous episodes try here http://www.suasnews.com/suas-news-podcast/ if my timing is completely wrong it will be available for download from this link shortly after it finishes.

You ever wanted to have a training quad for quad just for fun flying. Now you can!!

We are really thrilled of this possibility to offer for FREE these micro quads for all our customers who will buy one of our Assembled KITs. This offer is valid between 1.11 - 31.12.2012

You will automatically get one of these micro quads with following Assembled KITs:

• jD-Simplex Quad, Assembled
• jD-Simplex Hexa, Assembled
• jD Original ArduCopter Quad, Assembled
• jD Original ArduCopter Hexa, Assembled

RTF Micro quad kit contains everything else except 4 x AAA batteries for transmitter. It flies just like big multicopters and is really stable even on windy days. 

We have been having a lot of fun with these micro quads and they are great for fly training after you know how to fly multicopters you can use them for stunt or obstacle race flying which is really fun.

Even thou it fits on your hand, it's flying capacity is just amazing. Due it's light weight (32gr including battery) and body design it can take really bad crashes without breaking up. 

Get yours now while they last.. And let the fun begin.

Jani / jDrones

Something like a beta version of my "startup" http://www.rcdetails.info
Website and database to search motors, servos, batteries etc by a different criterias.

You can check several items to compare all properties.

Right now DB contains info about products from HobbyKing.com and from GoodluckBuy.com, and i'm working on adding info from TowerHobbies.com

I would like to hear your advices, your critic, your comments: mr.pokryshkin@gmail.com
I hope it will be helpful.

Thanks.

The PX4 firmware is improving in leaps and bounds. RC mode is very solid now (see demo above), and the full UAV ArduCopter port, which the APM dev teams are working hard on, now compiles on the ARM hardware, which is a big step. Very exciting.

We're planning a public beta of ArduCopter on PX4 by year end.

jDrones moving, the pain of brown boxes.... (part 2)

Few days ago I posted blog about construction project of our new office. And I promised to give more updates on how things are going, well now it's time to do that. 

There are some people that like to move just for fun but moving a company is not that easy thing as you might imagine when looking all those delivery boxes etc on picture above. That is small amount for first truck loads of stuff. You can literally feel the pain in back already. Good thing in Thailand is that you can always have a nice relaxing massage after hard day at office :)

Our new packing and shipping area is starting to form up. This will be one main area where Nin, Yao, Thee and few others will be working. We are still missing many tables and shelfs as they will be moved on these following days. 

Gap our main engineer is looking after electric cable assembly and planning out future engineering area.

Speaking of flying area. Closest flying area is just opposite of the road in front of our new office building. We can literally sit at office and fly to test area. But need to be careful of those wires :)

Already discussed with area owner of making small nice flying booth next to the square metal frame. If not booth at least some roof to cover pilots from burning sun while flying.

First set of boxes. This is the time when people starts to ask: "Hey Jani have you seen that screw driver???",  "Yes I have it's on brown box" :)

Engineering side does not look like engineering anymore, it's more like sea of boxes..

Nin is trying to figure how to arrange all her filers/binders to shelfs on admin area. She just have way too many papers. But like they say. On era of computers we will have paperless offices... YEAH Right...

There will be many more truck loads of stuff coming in next few days. Full operation should start on our new brand new office on 5. November. 

So I'm off to carry some more boxes and do more packing. 

Jani / jDrones

This last update  about VBRAIN add ON. In the picture you can see the first prototype of VR Neuron (Down) near the VR Brain (UP) . As you can see te board have the same mechanical design of VR Brain . The board is very compact 6x4 cm VR Brain 7x4 VR Neuron. You can put VR Neuron above and VR Brain up , connect the board by serial port and the use VR Neuron to connect the World :)

Above the board there is PAD for connect by an Header a breadboard or directly thw wire for add yor specific applciation. On the PAD there are available a lot of input output port 27 GPIO , SPI , I2C , Serial port .

In the next days will be more update until official presentation 9 November 2012 at Makers Italy .

In the last six month i decide to implement a new revolutionary design that could be usefull for add a lot on new functionality to our drones.

In the past we only work on micro controller : AVR , SAM3X, STM32 , great platform the last STM32f4 is best micro controller for manage our drone : acro and stable flight , loiter , waypoint navigation ecc ecc. But if i want to put on it a o.s. i start to have a lot of problem : small memory footprint available , not enough ram slow speed processor. So a lot of proposal .... ChibiOS , Nuttx . But what is better and opensource of the worlds ? No doubt It's Linux :)

In my professional work i used a lot of micro controller and micro processor , but all ,too complex to be hackable as a STM32. Until i start to play with a great Italian product , the first that put an Android on a wearable PC .

I like a lot the micro inside it and decide to use that microprocessor for my next opensource design.

I'm happy to present the first design of VR Neuron . It will be official present the 10 November 2012 at the Makers Italy exibithion so who would see our great new design are welcome to meet us at Makers Italy in Milan.

These are preliminary technical info about VR Neuron :

• Freescale Imx Arm9 microprocessor.
• 64 Megabyte Ram
• Flash until 32 Gbyte Flash on SDIO bus
• 456 mhz clock
• DUAL BEC 5V Input
• 1 for CPU
• 1 for USB channel
• 1 Pal Video Output
• 2 Audio Channel Output
• 1 Input audio channel
• 26 GPIO (LCD BUS)
• 2 i2c bus
• 1 SPI MISO MOSI SCK
• 2 serial Port
• 1 USB Host 2.0 channel
• Only 6x5 cm half of Raspberry PI

The operating system that i choose for my development is ArchLinuxArm , the powerfull of this design is incredible , i play a lot with the kernel and add a lot of usb device : wifi dongle , 3G dongle , webcam and install a lot of application and test it : apache2 , mysql , mjp-streamer .

So on this platform is possible to do anything of application , it's available python , gcc , i ply with mavlink_proxy and it work fine ... i connect the VBRAIN serial port to VNeuron and by wifi connect mission planner to VBRAIN and see live the telemetry of my quadcopter online.

With the PAL output could be possibile to develop a great OSD application or with oudio you can implement a tele presence systems ... the limit will be only fantasy :)

So i'm very exited about this project and i hope that you like it and join us in development.

Follow the evolution of project here :

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/group/armcopterdevgroup/forum/topics/penguin-project-introduction-and-started-the-developer-enrolment?xg_source=activity

Best

Roberto Navoni

Costly and frustrating start to my foray into hexacopters....  a heap of parts for a 3DR Hexacopter arrived last Friday, including APM 2.5, 5000mah 4s lipo, sonar sensor, 3DR telemetry link, uBlox GPS and the kit 850Kv motors and 10" props.  Asembled and working for Sat morning, with a couple of test flights in the garden Sat evening.  All good at this stage, but a couple of the prop nuts span off causing some crashes into the hedges.  No damage, but did need a metal detector to find the missing bits.

As of Sunday, I switched all the prop nuts for nylocks and went for some higher altitude tests, tested RTL and loiter functions.

Stabilise test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-9JV8qvOsQ&feature=g-upl

RTL test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlYYcI2dn4&feature=g-upl

Fast climb test:

https://i3.ytimg.com/vi/njhNUfK-BZE/mqdefault.jpg

Today the weather improved, and managed to nip out to a local abandoned airfield to test the telemetry link and the auto waypoint navigation.  All went well for about 30 sec, taking off smoothly to hover at 20m, then ascending to 50m for the next waypoint......  then disaster struck as I watched a prop flutter off into the distance, and the copter go into a terminal tumbling dive, crashing at high speed into a shallow bog! 

Suffice to say, it did not fair well - two motors sheared off the alu struts, four props shattered and the electronics stack shredded along with its protective foam cover....  not a pretty site.  Plus it was sat in about 5 inches of muddy water, covered in grass.  Dragged it out, removed the lipo and then trudged back to the car with my expensive armful of wreckage :(

So - the lesson - make sure your prop nuts are tight, very tight, and loctite'd and perhaps even lock-nutted!  Fortunately it didn't hit anyone on the way down, but there were some spectators nearby who almost cheered at the splash it made and then watched fascinated as I fished bitsout the bog.

Now to order some more bits....  hopefully mk2 will last longer than 4 days!

Here's some good news for people with a Turnigy 9X radio that are still using the default FlySky module.

HobbyKing has released a Spektrum DSM2/DSMX compatible module.  It has a working failsafe mode (the absence of which is a much-discussed topic), supports the popular ParkZone ARFS such as the Champ and Night Vapor, and uses the popular "Orange" line of DSM2 and DSMX receivers.

I've got mine on order and started a writeup here:

http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2012/10/dsm2dsmx-jr-module.html

For some reason it's not showing a buddy code, but when/if it does I'll post that as well.

This isn't Drone related but I saw this on reddit tonight and thought you guys would get a kick out of it.

Warning there is some adult language in this video so I shall mark it NSFW.

I know I've been quiet for a while but now that I'm almost settled into my new international home I figured I'd let you all know what I'm up to. Thanks to all my early customers and of course Jordi Munoz and Chris Anderson, Event 38 has recently joined the accelerator Startup Chile! Startup Chile is a program started by the Chilean government to attract small businesses to Santiago in the hope that it will create an entrepreneurial hotspot.. a Chilecon Valley.

You'll notice that everything is out of stock right now at Event38.com because I am also moving all production to Santiago temporarily. The long term will see a smaller US based office plus production internationally and potentially partnering with resellers to keep shipping prices low.

Look out for a new mapping plane in the next few months... cheaper, more rugged and easier to use!

If you're interested, check out my intro day slides I presented this morning to the other participants. Comments welcome!

We had quite a show last week as the Seattle Police held a public meeting to discuss their plans to use small surveillance drones for various purposes. Protesters made the meeting pretty much useless - lots of loud concern over civil liberties. I fear the coverage of offensive weaponized drones combined with a general concern over past misbehaviors by the police here have caused people to be especially suspicious of both the technology and the motives of the department.

The city is planning on spending app. $80,000 for two devices (which seems outrageous to me, but then again, I suspect they are getting a really good warranty).

I believe the ones they are looking at are the Draganflyer units (http://www.draganfly.com/)

I have been talking with Lorenz Meier about the PX4 and wanted to add a very quick blog post for the UK & EU PX4 Autopilot users, I have added the PX4 FMU to the store in the past few days, the range of connectors and cables will be growing long with any other parts that are needed in the future.

I have also managed to source the AR Drones 1.0 shells which means that you can add the PX4 direct into the AR Drone and be up and flying without the need to strip out the parts they normally come with! I hope this will help with quicker shipping inside the EU for all parts PX4.

If you have any other "needs" or "wants" please do let me know as I will be looking to stock all the PX4 parts in the near future.

Regards

Martin.

jDrones: 1.2.3.. Let's break the wall as it's time to move on....

We already stayed on our current office almost 2 years now and finally after a long search, it is our time to move to a next location. Our current office is getting just way too small and we have already expanded it to hold some of our bigger machines that we use to produce some of our parts. And there are more machines on their way so we can ensure that in future production quality and capacity is getting better and better. 

As we always been big part of this great DIYDrones community, and same thing like 3DR shown their new facilities, it is now our time to show few insiders of our new office. Also if you ever visit on Bangkok/Thailand you are most welcome to visit our office. Just contact us before your arrival so we can send map/destination details for you.

Anyways we did search quite long of this new area. Bangkok is a big city and it's not so easy to find areas with good access, flying areas etc on closeby but we did manage to find one.

First small background details of our new jDrones office: It is a 3 storey "town house" style with 2 units. Total office/factory area is around 420m2 (4500 ft2). Left side of the office we will have all engineering, manufacturing and testing, on right side there will be administration, packing & shipping.

So 1.2.3 let's break the wall.... On first month everything was looking bad or even worse, our engineers just wanted to break everything on the building. Dust and pieces of concrete lying everywhere. 

2nd floor where administration/management will be and oh more pieces of concrete.. You should never give big hammer to engineers, they have a bad habits to break everything.  

Immediately after the wall breaking operation was done at inside, we did build extra rooms on back side of the building so future expansion is easier.

Finally after month or so it was time to start put something back together, floors were done and it's time for first layers of new paint on the walls. Things are starting to look a bit better.

As we are working on flying devices, our walls have nice sky blueish color. Many of our customer know this girl already, Nin who is in charge of admin and shipping. After her daily packing and admin jobs were done at old office, she came to new office to do some paining jobs. She says that painting is really relaxing after packing and administration jobs.

Finally it's time to start closing those big holes that construction engineers made earlier. Time to assemble doors and walls between units. 

After inside doors were ready, engineers assembled front door/wall frames so we can keep precious cool air inside and naturally hot air outside. 

Things are finally starting to look promising and we can start to plan move soon. There are still many things to do before whole office is ready but it will be ready soon enough.

Part 2, coming soon shortly. We plan to move all operations to new office at end of October

Everyone welcome to visit us on new office starting from November 2012.

Jani / jDrones

Better Battery Box For Yellow FPV Plane

An improved battery box for my FPV plane project.  The front wheel need mounting on a spring piece, as do the rear struts. I don't like the idea of having no suspension at all, so will probably put springy trailing arms to let the rear wheels soak up some bumps without transmitting the landing/crashing forces directly to the frame.

Will be using a 2.5 liter Coke bottle as an aero shield with some foam board  internals to support the camera OSD GPS ect

Paul Barsamian did a great job of filming a perfect 6-waypoint ArduCopter mission from multiple views. 3DR Hexa frame, APM 1, uBlox GPS. So steady!

According to this article, this very ordinary looking quadcopter from AirCover Solutions that's being promoted to US police forces costs $40,000 to $60,000. Can anyone explain why?

When we updated and improved the 3DR ArduCopter frame, including slightly shorter arms for lighter weight, some of you with the original 3DR ArduCopter frames (both quad and hexa) were worried that you wouldn't be able to get replacement arms. We heard you and made a special order of those longer arms: now they're available.