The final episode in Thailand. Before flying back to Europe RiSCyD and Prefect found a nice spot on top of a hotel to do some city flying. The best vertical building proximity flying so far in my opinion ... what do you guys think?
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I completed my first build recently, having made a quadrotor. I built it from scratch, no kits involved, using Wii bits for the IMU and a LPC2103 for the brains running my own code. Weighing in at around 2.4kg it's not the lightest quadrotor around, but its motors are more than powerful enough. I've yet to test the maximum payload. Oh, and a custom shipping crate.
I did a writeup with lots of pictures and some flight videos here:
http://www.coolfactor.org/blog/2012/09/05/quadrotor/
No GPS or anything fancy yet - one step at a time. :)
Hi Guys,
A small project I have been working on. Its a cheap quad-copter frame made out of 6mm plywood and fiberglass. I was thinking of how to make a quad for as cheap as possible, when I thought of wood. I already had a 3mm fiberglass sheet, so I drew out the center plate and sent it to get machined.
Next I drew out some arms on some scrap plywood and sent that to get machined. All in all, machining cost was $0.06. Collected the machined parts the next day and assembled within an hour. Added a landing skid from a helicopter and mounted a Freeduino Mega ADK.
I'll use the Mega as a Flight Controller. A new FreeIMU 0.4.3 board form Fabio should be on its way soon. Planning on running ArduPiratesNG on the Mega - this is gonna be the cheapest platform capable of running Arducopter probably!
If you notice, my Mega is an ADK, which has a USB host capable of communication with Android devices. Thus I have the choice to add looooooots of features later.
Motor/Props/ESCs not thought of as of yet, so need your opinions here. Battery will be a 3S 2200mAh 30C Turnigy battery unless anyone here provides me with other options*hint*
There seems to be minor arm-flex, expected with plywood, but the wood itself is good (no filler material in between sheets). Tell me what you think about this. If you guys like it, I'll do a post on RCGroups as well.
I am a 14 year old 'kid' so any advice is welcome (stuff like "give the kid a prize!" is also welcome!)
Additional Pics:
Kabir
After the early death of my first quadcopter (small, cheap 300mm fibreglass frame), I decided to go for a more durable frame. I decided on the Talon V2 from Hobbyking.
It's fitted with the same Props/Motors/ESC's/APM from the original frame (8x4.5 props, 1380kV motors, 10A ESC's, APM 2.7.3), so I was worried it would be underpowered. In the end this was not a problem. The quadcopter is definitely not a "sporty" model, but it's got enough power for normal flying.
With a 3S 1380 mAh battery it weighs a bit over 800 grams and runs for about 6 to 8 minutes. The default APM parameters work very well for this setup. It is rock stable, even in light winds.
I accidentally bought the wrong sonar (the Maxbotix EZ4 rather than the EZ1), meaning the range and beamwidth were smaller than needed. By keeping the quadcopter's altitude to under 5m, the altitude hold mode still worked quite well though.
Next on the list is to investigate the optical flow sensor (currently sitting on my desk) and check out the performance improvements.
After six months of playing with vertical propellers, I'm finally getting out a bit. This is a small clip of a local little farm in Dewey Arizona, USA.
Cheers,
Jeff
hey everyone
another update on the techpod flight testing:
2 hour long flight complete!
this flight was done with:
2 x 6000 mah 3s for 12000mah total
weight: 5.8 lbs
APC E11x7
charging the lipos now to get the mah used will post that number in a couple hours.
thanks to all my supporters at the techpod kickstarter project !
Very sophisticated sensors but very difficult to program. Closed source.
From the Lawfare blog:
This excellent picture was forwarded to me by a colleague here at Brookings. It was shot by his friend,Bonnie Shaw, who tells me that she saw the flyer at the corner of 17th and Kalorama Streets, NW in Washington.
The drone turns out to belong to one Adam Eidinger—or at least, it used to. And Eidinger is very disappointed about his loss. Eidinger, who has been tweeting the matter, tells me that he uses his drone to take aerial videos of Washington D.C., most of which you can find on his YouTube channel.
Last Friday, Eidinger informed me that he wanted to take a short video of a festival in Adams Morgan, and was flying his quadcopter from a rooftop on 18th Street NW. A huge gust of wind blew it too far south and Eidinger quickly lost orientation. The copter was almost 5,000 feet away from him, and he couldn’t tell which way was forward and which way was backward. When his remote loses contact with the drone, says Eidinger, the copter is programmed to slowly descend on its own—a “safe landing mode,” which prevents it from simply falling out of the sky and crashing. So it’s possible that the quadcopter is sitting on a rooftop somewhere in the area—maybe even on your rooftop (have you checked?). Eidinger doesn’t think it has fallen in a public place, because he says he canvassed the whole area and had no luck.
The quadcopter is 2 ft x 2 ft and was purchased in China, says Eidinger, because there are virtually no commercially available units like these in America. Eidenger customized it, and the total cost of the contraption was about $700.
It really is kind of amazing how the proliferation of cheap technologies has revolutionized the way we interact with our communities and surroundings.
(Thanks to Christopher Downing for the link)
I wanted to share with you our video on updating the firmware on your 9x radio. This is a follow up to our "9x DIY Upgrade Kit" install video. It covers everything you need to successfully update the firmware on your 9x radio following the hardware install covered in first video. In addition, this video also shows you how to install sample models and calibrate your radio.
**Update- parts for the 9x DIY Upgrade Kits have arrived and we'll begin taking orders Saturday, Sept 15 and first shipments will be on the following Monday.**
The 9x Firmware Update video is divided into sections allowing you to skip to the needed information:
- Download Firmware and Software Tools - 1:02
- Firmware Update Process - 4:28
- Sample Models - 8:00
- Calibration - 9:53
While this video mentions our 9x DIY Upgrade Kit, the information will be helpful to anyone who has a programmer installed on their 9x radio.
Let us know if this video helps and also what else you would like us to cover.
Thanks for watching!
Visit our site for these and other RC products.
http://parkeflyer.com
Intro music by Pong, the greatest rock band you've never heard of. (used with permission)
This project utilises the concept of using the existing APM and configuration tools and a seperate radio link to send back specific telemetry data, in this case depth and a seperate GPS marker so that no code on the APM needs to be changed.
I see this as an advantage doing two links as it means that those that are not comfortable doing a lot of code changes can play round and develop links on the side no matter what form of drone or scientific data add on needs to be applied.
The seperate telemetry unit utilizes a arduino running the new software serial code which time slices between the MTK GPS running at 9600 and a Cruzpro depth sounder running NMEA-0183. The seperate radio link is currently a radiometrix spaceport modem and is sent to a text file. Below is some of the text file sent via the long range modem. The telemetry is untouched for the APM and is sent back via X-bees.
,LAT=,-40.168949 ,LON=,175.363296 ,SAT=,9 ,Depth=,$SDDPT,002.1,*7A
,LAT=,-40.168949 ,LON=,175.363327 ,SAT=,9 ,Depth=,$SDDPT,002.1,*7A
,LAT=,-40.168949 ,LON=,175.363327 ,SAT=,9 ,Depth=,$SDDPT,002.1,*7A
,LAT=,-
Currently all the links and the code have been tested and the boat (the largest deep V hobby king could provide) arrived yesterday so now we start the hardware.
Pictures below are of the two positions of the two seperate links as they need to be a close match.
Here's a quick look at our SteadiDrone QU4D Ultra, more videos of our range coming soon. This has APM2.5, please share your comments!
SteadiDrone QU4D Ultra from Motion Pixel on Vimeo.
Not sure how to link to this directly, but it's on their facebook page now:
http://www.facebook.com/flitetest
Let them know what you think!
Lots of people have suggested 3D printing propellers, but Landru is the first I've seen to do it. Looks pretty good! (I'm not sure I'd trust my old Makerbot with this--he's got a better printer.) He writes:
This is a redesign for an 8040 printable propeller with a 5.5mm (13/64") bore.
This prop was designed to keep the minimum cross section above .8mm allowing it to be more easily printed, though at a small efficiency loss.
The propeller will require support on one edge, which makes it very easy to remove.
I can redesign this for some different center hole diameters if requested, just give me some time as I am pretty busy.
Here is a short video with the prop on a motor:youtube.com/watch?v=v6yClT12Ges&feature=plcp
I will also be uploading a 5030 prop once it is flight tested.
I printed mine on a Fablicator using Kisslicer.
I threw together a little video for the manual showing how I calibrate the magnetometer in the ArduCopter setup. And then YouTube user cylllka put it to music. Catchy! If I had known I'd be making a music video, I would have dressed better ;-)
This picture is the last of the backlogged APM 2.5 orders going out from the 3DR shipping department. Orders should be shipped within 1-2 days from now on. Whew!
Demand was overwhelming but the 3DR team brought the second Tijuana pick-and-place line up with some state-of-the-art machines and it's finally running smoothly now. The line can now handle 500 APM 2.5 boards a week (in addition to its share of all the other 3DR products).
We're still listing the assembled APM 2.5 boards as shipping within one week (unassembled is 1-2 days), but that's conservative. Most boards should ship within a few days now.
The enclosures are still a couple weeks away. We decided to modify them slightly with a special foam shield for the baro sensor, to protect it from any wind distortion, so it went back for another design rev/test cycle. It will be worth it--you should see much better alt-hold performance with the enclosure on.
http://www.n3kl.org/sun/index.html
http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/SunStorm
During a solar storm substance of the sun will be thrown explosively into the space.
Even that the sun is about 150 Mio. kilometers far away from us those solar particles hit the earth with a speed of more than 2000 Km/sec. .
The most known effect of the solar storms are the Northern Lights (polar lights).
Normally the Earth's magnetic field protects us against solar storms. With particularly strong solar storms this magnetic field will brake and can lead to disturbances on earth.
And due to those solar storms in February 2011 the radio reception in south China was disrupted or in 1989 the power grid of Quebec City was paralyzed down.
Right now (2012) we have the strongest solar storms since 5 years. The severe phase of solar activitiy is currently still growing.
The peak will be reached approximately in 2013. The effects are not estimated yet.
These solar storms are also the GPS satellites in space exposed. In an interrupted GPS reception the exact location of course also affected. GPS-based systems can not function properly.
The Kopter cannot hold i.e. with the function PositionHold the exact position or fly to a different point with the function ComingHome or execute different other GPS-based function without any error.
To see the GPS behavior during a solar storm the Kopter was placed in an open meadow and been not moved.
The received satellite data showed now no precise position. By the incorrectly transmitted data through the satellite the GPS on the Kopter thought, that the Kopter moves.
And that with ~10m/s in a radius of ~64mtr!
This is a Widget to display the latest 3 Hourly Planetary(estimated Ap) K Indices fromhttp://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/lists/geomag/AK.txt to e.g. help UAS Pilots to be aware of possible GPS-Problems. Read more about that here:http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/SunStorm
The whole APP ist OpenSource and you can find the code on https://github.com/ligi/Solar-Activity-Monitor
Thanks to http://mikrokopter.de for the impulse, http://www.swpc.noaa.gov for the Data and Clemens -Nebukad- Wronski for the Graphics!
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/de/ (Creative Commons / Non Commercial / Share Alike)
Addtitonally to this Licence it is not allowed to use this project in any violent manner! This explicitly includes that lethal Weapon owning "People" and Organisations (e.g. Army & Police) are not allowed to use this Project.
Keywords:
UAS UAV GPS Accuracy Solar Storm MikroKopter MultiRotor MultiKopter Navigation
Please be advised that MAVProxy now has a "homepage" and initial documentation effort.
If you can add to the documentation please do. If you find a mistake, please fix it. If you want to complain about how poor it is to start with, I'll listen to your complaints only after you've edited more on that subject that I have. :-)
I am not an author of mavproxy, but am doing this with the primary author's support, (Tridge)
It is located here: http://qgroundcontrol.org/mavlink/mavproxy_startpage
Cortex-M4 256 KB Flash, 48 KB RAM
