Blogs

A couple startup companies are trying to create a new market for wind energy from "kites", which are really tethered UAVs flying circular patterns. Energy is generated by the props, which drive motors to act as turbines. The two are Makani Power, which is funded by Google, and Joby Energy, which also runs Joby Robotics, which we've been discussing in another thread for the closed-source Paparazzi IMU they just released.

The multiple-shot picture below shows Makani's UAV flying a typical pattern. A animation that shows it in action is here.

The Makani IMU-driven autopilot is described in detail here. Here a video showing it from the Ground Station perspective:

The Joby technology (shown at top) is similar, and appears to be a spin-off of Paparazzi's Booz IMU project. If you're familiar with the Booz quad-to-forward-flight aircraft, you'll recognize the videos on this page.

This month Popular Mechanics has a good article on both of them. It's not online yet, but here are the pages (click for full size):

This is the sequel of my previous post, that I had to abandon more than 1 month ago, without actually being able to fly it... Ok, it's still not flying, but after:

1. burning part of the Razor 9DOF IMU
2. adding a Wii Motion Plus (for the gyros) to it
3. replacing the .net micro framework board (Fez Domino) with an Arduino 
4. replacing the Arduino with another Arduino based on AtMega 328 (as the code was too big)

I'm back in business ! :) And to prove it, here are 2 videos that show some proper balancing !

Actually, all this was only so that I can update the code, to feed  the gyros raw data directly into the PID controller algorithm (only for  the D part), as using solely the Euler angles from the DCM  transformation is too slow to react...
 
Again, it's not yet flying, but looks much more promising than 1 month ago... wish me luck ! :)
HERE you can find more details and the full history of this build...

dan

Cuadricoptero Diy Español Arducopter

www.cuadricoptero.dynalias.com

https://sites.google.com/site/cuadricoptero/home

it's in progres 

This video shows how each user can configure the layout and even individual sliders and buttons of QGroundControl for his personal needs. This version is compatible with the current ArduPilotMega pre-release 2.0 codebase from the SVN repository (trunk). Please note that the video shows only a snapshot, not the final QGroundControl 0.8.3 release version (we're still improving it on a daily basis). User feedback is very welcome, if you want to try it yourself you can download a binary for Mac OS and Windows.

https://github.com/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/downloads/

    About two months ago we added altitude hold using the Maxbotix sonar to the ArduCopter (you can find instructions re how to set it up on the wiki).  At the moment on the we recommend the LV-EZ4 and XL-EZ4 but that's not based on a lot of research or experience so the question to the community is:

            Which one of the Maxbotix sonars is best for our purpose?  

     Above you can some pics extracted from the datasheets of the four sensors.  Each is a 1 foot grid and shows the theoretical range within which the sonar can sense a 3.5 inch pole (look at the black lines, not the red dots)

For those of you who prefer a scripting language for your MAVLink needs, you may like to have a look at pymavlink, a Python implementation of the MAVLink protocol.I've just released version 0.2, which fixes some bugs, and adds support for the latest changes in the upstream mavlink git repository.

I initially wrote pymavlink to make it easier to develop MAVProxy, a little command line tool which provides a proxy between a MAVLink master and some number of slaves. I use this for a HIL setup between FlightGear, APM and qgroundcontrol. I'm releasing it more widely as I'm hoping it will be more generally useful to the diydrones community. It can be used to write little scripts that manipulate and display MAVLink messages in interesting ways.

The way pymavlink works is that you generate a custom mavlink python module using mavgen.py, which reads a set of MAVLink message definition files in their XML format, and spits out a ready to use python module that implements all the messages in the XML files.

A good example of what can be done with a short script is mavlogdump.py, which formats a qgroundcontrol MAVLink log file in a human readable manner. This really shows the advantage of using a scripting language for MAVLink, as it can easily display structures without having to write a lot of formatting code for each of the messaging types.

For our UAV project we are planning on using sets of python scripts with pymavlink to do things like mission planning, log analysis, camera control, image processing etc.

If you want to ask questions about pymavlink, it is probably best to join the mavlink mailing list.

Here a video of a test flight of my Quad Rotor Observer (QRO) v8 with the FCWii board and the Wii Motion Plus (gyroscopes) + Nunchuk (accelerometers) MEMS sensors.

There was a strong wind during the tests flights (30 Km/h NW, gusting 40 Km/h, rainy...)
The tests flights have been successful, the model was very stable in spite of the bad weather conditions.
Normal flight mode and Auto-Level mode have been tested in the video.

Flight controller hardware:
- FCWii board v1.0 (ATmega 328P, Arduino PRO MINI 5V/16 Mhz compatible) from Fpv4ever
- Wii Motion Plus (genuine Nitendo version)
- Nunchuk (genuine Nitendo version)

Flight controller firmware:
- MultiWii V1_pre7 (compiled with the Arduino IDE) by Alexandre Dubus (Alexinparis)
firmware is uploaded via a FTDI 5V cable.

Quadcopter setup:
- 4 brushless motors DualSky XM2822CA 1450KV 7A
- 4 ESC 12A XC1210-BA
- Lipo battery 3S (11.1V) Turnigy Nanotech 2200 mAh
- receiver Corona CR6D 2.4 Ghz
- home made aluminum frame

The video has been taken with a GoPro HD Wide and a camera head strap.

Below the GUI for the setup and the tuning:

More infos at:
http://diydrones.com/profile/JeanLouisNaudin

Regards, Jean-Louis

We start to send the first batch of Multipilot32  to user and DevCoreTeam , i  hope that this video will be usefull in power on and uploading firmare . In the next day will be available more info about the first flyable code . The first software that i upgrade to MP32 is Arducopter NG. The first revision of code will be only a porting of mono task application to new micro controller . This is only first step of our work , a starting point this micro is more fast until 24x more flash 512 kbyte , more ram 64 kbyte ram. An a lot of advanced feature. And is cheaper :) 

I open a Call for C / C++ developer and beta tester  that would support the development of our project.

This is the repo of code : http://code.google.com/p/multipilot32/

In the next day will be available new code and doc in source branch inside redfox74. if you need more info contact me directly in PM or leave a message in the thread.

The board is compatible with all the DiyDrones accessories and is an upgrade of cpu from avr 8 bit processor to  32 Bit Arm Cortex . In this first stage we need advanced user that can develop code and have experiences on writing code on micro processor. 

 This is the official thread where there're some info about the project and roadmap.

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/vros-01-white-paper-simple

This is the main thread where you can found info for start to use Multipilot32

http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot32-getting-started

Just putting this out there...

I recently purchased 6 batts from HobbyCity.com and selected the USA Warehouse for shipping.  That was Wednesday the 23rd, it's Friday the 25th and they are on my desk.  I selected the USPS shipping option 2/3 day for less than $1.50 over the default shipping cost, bringing the cost of shipping to $11.  The package was sound and well protected.

I am very satisfied with the purchase.

I know that others have had bad times with some items from them, but if this is any kind of indication of turn around I'll be shopping HC more often and will purchase if the item is available from their US location.

Somehow I missed this when it came out in December, but NASA is running a competition for low-cost, energy-efficient autonomously-pilot passenger vehicles, which would take off and land from small "pocket airports" in neighborhoods. NASA is hoping for a winner of the autonomous challenge by 2015.

Gizmag has the whole story. Excerpt:

NASA’s Green Flight Challenge that is offering US$1.6 million in production funds to the winning design for a for low-cost, quiet, short take-off personal aircraft, that require little if any fossil fuel. The competition, to be decided next July, is being run by NASA’s light-aircraft partner CAFE (Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency), which envisions the resulting Suburban Air Vehicles (SAVs) taking off and landing at small neighborhood “pocket airports.”

I know this is a military drone, which we don't cover here, but I was taken by the screen shots of the ground control center of the X-47B, which had its first flight a few weeks ago. HappyKillmore--yours looks way better!

The video has also been re-released with a new rock soundtrack, which is actually pretty good. Check it out:

Here's the latest on Pipo board development. Code already contains AHRS, PID, PWM and multiplexer routines.   I still need to complete the AP/GPS routines, the simple configurations via the radio and only after that I'll tackle the AP routines.

As it is I think I'm doing OK for space.  I'm currently using ~40% of program space and ~15% of eeprom space so there should be enough room left over for the AP.

The Paparazzi team have released a new IMU board called Asprin. It's just the accelerometers, gyros and magnetometer sensors (no processor) and is available for $110 at Joby Robotics.

Strangely, I can't find any mention of it being open source. Is it actually possible that Paparazzi is no longer supporting open source hardware? That would be sad if true. They seem to have deleted the Hardware folder from their repository. [Correction: the hardware repository is here. It only has the schematic of Lisa (no board file) and no files at all for Asprin]. I've asked for clarification, but haven't heard back yet.

Remember that Paparazzi's tagline is "Bringing freedom to UAV since 2003". Maybe it should be "Bringing freedom to UAVs, 2003-2010" ;-)

[UPDATE: The official statement: "For the time being the Eagle files for Aspirin are not released in a OSHW definition compatible way. We at Joby Robotics would love to be able to release the files. But we don’t feel comfortable with that at the moment. It is a continuing discussion here at Joby Robotics, so let’s hope for the best! 

P.S. Aspirin is not a “Paparazzi” design as such, it was developed at Joby Robotics with close collaboration with Paparazzi community. It may have not been reflected by the article properly for some readers."]

[UPDATE2: On March 3rd, the Joby team did decide to release the files and open source the boards. Lisa is here and Asprin is here. Good news!]

Hi all ! First of all, let me introduce myself : I'm Pierre from the north of France. I'm a RC sailboats enthusiast since my childhood. 

Two years ago, I decided to launch a community site to enable all practitioners of model sailing to share their experiences : Voile-RC (sorry, french speaking)...

On this social network, I met people with whom we are now to mount a construction project: an autonomous unmanned sailboat whose only sources of energy are wind and sun. This sailboat, when ready, will perform journey of about 200 nautical miles in complete autonomy (Atlantic or Mediterranean Sea) ... Needless to say that this project is both exciting and motivating ...

For other enthusiasts to join us, and eventually build comparable sailboats, we decided to create class rules. And that's what we've done here: vrc-a.org! Of course, all is not yet fixed in this class and we're listening to all those who want to participate. In particular, these class rules currently only exist in French ... If you understand French and want to help us to translate it into English (and in any other language) you're welcome.

This class has the distinction of being published under a Creative Commons license because we want it to be used by anyone who wants ...

In a future post I will talk about "Open Sailor", the first sailboat to be designed to meet the requirements of this class. Let me just enough time to give her a nice website ..

Pierre

We've now got more than 40 retailers and distributors selling 3D Robotics gear around the world, in addition to the main store here. You may want to shop at one near you, both to save on shipping and support local robotics companies.

If you want to become a 3D Robotics distributor, please email partnerships@3drobotics.com for terms.

North America

US

• SparkFun Electronics (ArduPilot and APM boards, ArduIMU)
• Computerland Woodbridge
• MKMX America
• Quadrocopter LLC
• Viper Flight Systems

Canada

• CanadaDrones
• New Generation Hobbies

Europe

UK

• Build Your Own Drone
• Unmanned Tech
• Cool Components
• Proto-Pic
• Gladston's

Germany

• Watterott Electronic Gmb
• UAV-Store

Greece

• UCanDrone

Italy

• WishYourGift

Lithuania

• Prokinesis

Netherlands

• Aurora ICT

Norway

• Robonor

Portugal

• Inmotion

Romania

• Robofun

Slovenia (serving all EU)

• OneDrone

Switzerland

• YouCanFly

Turkey

• Robitshop

Spain

• ElectronicaRC
• IberoRobotics
• Stock RC

Asia

Australia

• Bask Industries
• Roboteshop
• SkymationUAV
• UAV Robotics

Japan

• JapanDrones

Korea

• J&E Systech

Malaysia

• Average Drone RC
• MyInvent Ent

Singapore

• Singapore Hobby Supplies
• Singapore Robotic
• Shining Sunlight International
• SGDrone

Thailand

• jDrones

Taiwan

• Aroboto

India

• Rhydo Technologies
• Tenet Technetronics

Latin America

Argentina

• RC Juampa

Chile

• RIAB Electronics

Mexico

• uDrones (maker of RTL ArduCopter and APM and core DIY Drones partner)

Brazil

• ArduPilot Brazil
• Multilógica

Africa

South Africa

• Clowns Hobbies
• Netram Technologies

Following on from my PPM Encoder mods (PPM Encoder Updated), I needed to be able to test and tune the main rotor speed controller.  I figured that a small setup was needed to simulate the pulses generated by the RPM sensor, that was motor driven and speed controllable by the ACM board.

So on the right of the photo, you see a my RPM test set consisting of plastic bucket lid, with a hole to allow light onto a sensor below.  The lid is bolted to a small brushless motor, and the ESC (which I think I just burned out) is connected to the throttle servo output on the ACM.

When it's fired up, the PPM Encoder is measuring the RPM pulse timing and outputting the result to Ch5 into the APM chip.  However, due to the method I calculate the timing, the resolution on the RPM speed is useless.

So as far as the PPM encoder mods go - its back to the drawing board.

(The things we do in the name of progress)....

If you admired Festo's lovely RC airfish but didn't have a zillion dollars to spend on one, no fear: you'll soon be able to buy a toy version, called AirSwimmers. Just begging to be made autonomous! A good use for your old Blimpduino boards...

Festo's original:

(Via Adafruit)

As we've mentioned before, our long term plan for ArduPilot includes it being compatible with Willow Garage's Robot Operating System as a "ROS Node", which is to say that it can communicate with ground computers running ROS for things like swarming and multi-UAV control. The Willow Garage team is supporting this, too, and here's their latest update on Arduino+ROS progress:

 

We recently wanted to hook up an analog gyro (the Analog Devices ADXRS614) to ROS, and decided to use an Arduino to handle the conversion.

The Arduino runs a tiny loop that reads the analog values from its six analog lines,and writes these values to the USB serial connection.  Meanwhile on the robot, a small ROS Python node listens to the USB reports, and publishes them as a ROS topic.

That's all there is to it: the whole thing takes under 40 lines of code.

This is probably the simplest possible way to use an Arduino with ROS.  There are quite a few more sophisticated projects:

• pmad  - controls an Arduino's I/Os using ROS service calls
• avr_bridge - automates generation of ROS-Arduino message transport
• arduino - our own package: an Arduino as an Ethernet-connected ROS node