Blogs

I installed the ReadyMadeRC pan/tilt pod for the Skywalker this evening, and was delighted to find that it's also a perfect fit for ArduPilotMega. The autopilot and GPS fit very neatly right into the back of the pod, as shown above.

The whole thing is custom made for the foam Skywalker and fits like a glove, all secured with a little thumb screw in the front. And it keeps APM out in the open, so you can see the LEDs. Sweet!

Quadcopter simulation on AeroFly Professional Deluxe

Here, you will find the model of my Quad Rotor Observer (QRO) v5 for the AeroFly Professional Deluxe simulator

(AFPD).
This is very useful for training purposes during outside bad weather conditions and/or during our cold winter...

The QRO v5 quadcopter model for AFPD can be dowloaded HERE

Tested successfully on Aerofly Professional Deluxe v1.9.7.11

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

Regards and Enjoy,

Jean-Louis

It started out playing with model helicopters over a few Friday night beers.

Now, it's becoming big business, using the ultimate in boys' toys.

News item link

Mr Wilmot, Media Mechanics' director, said he first thought about attaching a camera to a helicopter when he was flying model helicopters at after-work drinks sessions.

The helicopter, which weighs 12kg and costs $38,000, is handy for filming where static photography or photography using full-sized helicopters doesn't work.

One of the trickiest parts of selling electronics kits, as we do, is how to handle customer support and returns. I'd estimate that 90% of the problems that users have with DIY Drones gear is due to user error: soldering mistakes, not following the manual properly, issues with their own PC/Mac, or simply misunderstandings and confusion about how to use the products (no doubt sometimes due to documentation that could be improved).

But perhaps 10% of user problems (and only a tiny fraction of all orders, of course) really are due to defective boards, which somehow made it out of our factory with a problem. Although every board is tested and demonstrated working before being shipped, there are some things that our test code doesn't check, such as what happens when that particular board is vibrated or subjected to cold temperatures. And there are other products that we simply resell and don't test, which could have come from their makers faulty (a recent batch of FTDI cables from China had the wires connected in the wrong order, for example).

So how to handle returns? The normal answer for companies that sell finished goods doesn't work for DIY kit sellers, since it's hard to tell whether the problem was due to a manufacturing error or user error. So most such retailers have a clause in their terms of service like this one, from MakerBot (which they discuss here), that pretty much says that the moment you power it on or touch it with a soldering iron, the manufacture's responsibility ends:

Returning Purchased Items. MakerBot Industries accepts returns for any unaffected item within 14 calendar days from the date of receipt of merchandise."Unaffected" means a device has never been assembled, powered up, programmed, or otherwise changed. MakerBot Industries cannot accept returns on purchased items that have had electrical power applied to them, or been otherwise programmed, changed, or affected.

The paradox, of course, is how can you know it's defective before you power it on? In practice, most of these companies will accept returns of products that have been powered on, but typically not if they've been soldered. We wrestled with this and decided to be more explicitly generous in our terms, while still limiting our liability:

Defective products manufactured in house will be replaced within 10 days of receipt, with the same item. All goods are checked before they are sent out. In the unlikely event that goods are faulty, they must be returned, to the DIY Drones store at the address listed on your order invoice. The DIY Drones store will not accept goods that have clearly been used more than the amount needed to evaluate their functionality. If the goods are found to be in working condition, and the lack of functionality is a result of lack of knowledge or assembly error on the customers part, no refund will be made, but the goods will be returned to the user at their expense

So this is a judgement call. Most of the time, when people ship us back "defective" boards, it's clear that they were simply soldered wrong or not defective at all (the user had plugged in their RC gear wrong or loaded the wrong code). In cases of soldering errors, if it's easy to fix we might do that, but if it's really been bungled, we may just send it back. We try to error on the side of being as helpful as possible, but there are limits to what we can do.

We've invested a lot in customer and technical support over the past few months and now have full-time employees doing both.  As the MakerBot post linked above points out, this is uncharted territory for open source hardware companies like ours, and we're all trying to find the path that is right for the community but also allows for sustainable businesses. It will evolve over time. But I wanted to let our customers know how we're approaching this, and I welcome suggestions on how to do it even better.

Testflights Acro Mode ArduPirates Quad from Norf on Vimeo.

The ArduPirates team, who have taken over development of the 1st Generation ArduCopter code, have been posting amazing videos of the ArduCopter platform doing stunts and otherwise showing remarkable range in this Vimeo channel.  Norf, who is world-class quad pilot, is doing acrobatics in acro mode above.

How about an awesome smooth APM-driven hexicopter?

Ardumega Hexacopter from levent oktay on Vimeo.

ArduPirate's ship second test flight from Helicoblast on Vimeo.

GPS position and altitude hold!

Testing Hein`s new ArduPirates NG Update 212 from Norf on Vimeo.

Congrats to the whole ArduPirate team...this is great community work!

Another entry to the Willow Garage Robot Operating System (ROS) 3D contest: a nice job of sensor fusion with a Kinect and optical flow sensors on a quad.

The ROS blog writes it up:

The Chair of Automation Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology shows just how versatile a Kinect on a quadrotor can be. Their entry, "Autonomous corridor flight of a UAV using the Kinect sensor", uses the Kinect to find the ceiling, walls, and floor of a corridor. Once the quadrotor knows the geometric structure of the corridor, it can happily fly down the middle to get where it needs to go.

Their demo is built on an AscTec Pelican with a stripped-down Kinect. To handle the rest of the autonomous flight needs, they use a ADNS 3080 optical flow sensor for position and velocity control, and a SRF10 sonar sensor for altitude control. Sample-consensus algorithms from PCL are used to convert the 3D point cloud data into the estimated positions of these surfaces. Remarkably, they managed to make all of this run on an Atom processor.

From the Wired Autopia blog:

AeroVironment has successfully flown its Global Observer unmanned aircraft for the first time powered by a hydrogen-fueled propulsion system. With a wingspan of 175 feet, the Global Observer is a long-endurance UAV that could stay aloft up to a week at a time according to the company.

The first hydrogen fueled flight lasted four hours and was at lower altitudes above Edwards Air Force Base in California. But the company says the aircraft would fly missions at 65,000 feet making it an observation platform and communications link over a very wide area approximately 600 miles in diameter. By combining a pair of Global Observers, each of which could fly for up to a week at a time, operators could provide continuous coverage over any part of the earth’s surface for “as long as needed” according to AeroVironment.

A liquid hydrogen powered internal combustion engine drives a generator that powers the four propellers as well as batteries and operational payloads. At the high altitudes the Global Observer is expected to fly, it would be flying above most weather and other air traffic, possibly simplifying the use of the aircraft in existing airspace.

Helicoblast over at the ArduPirates RCG thread answered a frequently-asked question on the various ArduPilot code bases with this great graphic.  The only small corrections I'd make is that the software the DIY Drones dev team (left column) is currently working on, which is an effort to sync up with ArduPilotMega (APM), the very mature full UAV code on fixed wing aircraft, is actually code-named ArduCopterMega (ACM).  It will be released with the month as ArduCopter 2.0.

Also, ArduCopterNG (next generation) and ArduCopter RC2 (release candidate 2) are actually the same thing. RC2 was just the public name for NG. The big blue arrow to the right means that further development of RC2 was handed off to the ArduPirates team while the DIY Drones dev team did a restart based on the APM architecture to achieve full UAV functionality with ArduCopter 2.0.

The ArduPirates code, which is what we recommend people use until ArduCopter 2.0 is released, is here.

Ning (the social network platform DIY Drones is built on) is rolling out a bunch of new features, many of which we'll be implementing here. Today's is the "Like" button, which you'll find at the top of posts (the comment count has also moved to the top of the post when it's displayed on the front page). You can click it for anything that you enjoyed, and over time we'll add features that raises the profile of content with lots of likes.

There's also a Facebook Like, which will post the like to your Facebook feed.

Coming later this week is a proper professional redesign of the site, which will give it a new look (not radically different, but hopefully cleaner and easier on the eye). A bit wider, too.

Shark

"Tube-launched and weighing in at only 2.5kg (5.5lb), the composite Shark is designed to fly quietly at low altitudes for long periods of time, gathering intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance information, the Arizona-based company says.

The Shark measures 0.79m (2.5ft) long, with a 0.97m wingspan with the wings deployed. It can carry payloads weighing up to 0.45kg."

With Ardupilot Mega now in full swing and my brain going haywire thanks to the rubbish weather I have been taking distractions where I can (IR radar system for my computer desk, a segway for my action man, web enabled curtain opener and more).

Over a few hours I had my scribble pad out with some vernier calipers and a Cirrus CS301 servo. The result was a fairly small fully retractable camera system (at least in doodles). Wanting to create a quad from CF a friend offered his laser cutter (free of charge) but wanted a test subject to see how it cut. A few days later the doodle was CAD'd and then lasercut out of CF. I had three fit on a single sheet which leaves room for when I break it.

The entire mechanism is 120mm x 35mm x 35mm when "retracted" (these settings are yet to be finalised on plane) while when extended the assembly is  65mm below the plane. Unfortunately the camera must then be added to the bottom making it larger but as my camera (eBay keychain camera £4 each :D) is 34mm x 12mm x 55mm its quite nice.

Only thing left to do was the coding which I'd already started thinking about anyway. It uses lots of pre-existing code from within the APM sketches (so I know it works and if not I broke it). As long as the camera is on the bottom of the plane (level XY) it can be rotated in any direction (so if centered the camera will face right at 90°) and still track a GPS position. Using a few defines and a bit of math any limited movement servos can be used to track a GPS position.

As Ardupilot has been moving in this direction I undertook this myself with a hope of creating something worthy of general release later after I and the bosses had tested (why I haven't given out some details). This was saved to my drafts so it would not be published until I had finished writing the blurp explaining all of this but apparently "Save as Draft" means publish immediately. It is very flexible thanks to the variables changing servo output direction and matching center facing direction with flight bearing its limitation is just the level downwards mounting. That is my next task after testing this.

Edit: New code loaded with proof of concept spreadsheet. Here is hoping for some good weather.

Alex posts some good news: he's going to be selling his nicely-made multicopter frames for those who want alternatives to the standard ArduCopter frame:

"I'm starting off offering Quad frames and will soon be offering Hexa and Octo frames along with stabilized camera mounts. I will update this blog as things progress.

So now the offerings. First is a simple quad frame no electronics box...You can add your own CD Case top , Tupperware, or do what Kinderkram has done and find yourself one of those fancy surveillance camera domes and bolt it directly ontop. Second I will offer a frame plus electronics box with plenty of space to protect your expensive electronics. The frame and motor mounts are made out of expanded PVC it makes for a nice stiff but vibration dampening platform perfect for those sensitive accelerometers and smooth FPV/AV cameras. Arms can be ordered either in Aluminum or Carbon Fiber. I will include with any frame ordered two extra sets of motor mounts in case you have an accident.

The simple frame version (frame, arms, and motor mounts) will be $65.00 with aluminum arms and $95.00 for protruded carbon fiber arms. And the full frame set the one including the electronics box will cost $125.00 for aluminum arm version and $140.00 for the protruded carbon fiber arms. This is all in US currency and shipping is not included.

Until I get a steady order stream, frames will be made to order so please expect 3-5 day delay from day of ordering to day of shipping. I will request a 50% deposit on ordering and the remainder before shipping."

So my drone project has been a slow process, I've got my Ardupilot mega, and it's doing everything it should do on the ground, but I'm yet to find an airframe I'm happy to fly it in, and because I like to do everything the hard way, I decided to build my plane 100% from scratch.

I've been toying with different frame designs, and decided to give a basic twin boom design a try, something I've never flown before. I decided to make version1 very basic, small, and RC only, just to get used to the flight characteristics. 

The fuse and wing are standard Styrofoam, cut with a hot wire. The wing is reinforced with a small carbon fibre tube, and both are covered in monocote. 

After a successful maiden flight I decided to strap my helmet cam to it and push the plane to it's limits, I obviously didn't push hard enough (apart from blowing up my motor at the end).

Motor has been removed in the photo.

Enjoy and try not to get sick watching ;)

Don't know if the embedding will work so heres the url http://vimeo.com/19422516

Some RC fun from Jon Keller on Vimeo.

I've now had a chance to compare the original foam Skywalker ($83) with the new HobbyKing fiberglass Skywalker clone ($97).  They are both magificent birds, and it's just incredible how China can produce high-quality fiberglass and ply planes for about the same price as foam these days. 

The two have exactly the same dimensions and are otherwise essentially identical in overall shape and size. Although I've only flown the foam one, if the fiberglass and ply one flies the same, you should expect it to be equally smooth and stable in the air, able to handle wind well and carry a huge payload. They're both excellent UAV/FPV airframes and can stay in the air for 40 minutes or more with big enough batteries.

Choosing between them is really a matter of whether you prefer the somewhat more ding-resistant (but harder to repair) fiberglass and ply or whether you prefer foam for its easy-to-hack nature and crash-handling. Normally the choice between fiberglass-and-ply vs. foam would also take into consideration the interior room (fiberglass has much thinner walls so more room inside) but in the case of these two birds, they both have so much room that it's not an issue. You can pack all your electronics, 8,000mah of batteries and your lunch in both, with loads of space to spare.

In the end, I slightly prefer the foam version for a few reasons:

• Wing comes apart into two pieces for easy transport (the fiberglass version has a single-piece wing)
• Easier to build and modify, as is usually the case for foam. Between an exacto knife and Gorilla Glue, there's not much I can't do with a foam plane.
• Better crash resistance? The foam one's wing attaches with a big bungee cord, while the fiberglass one bolts on, which feels like a likely point of crash failure to me.
• It's so plain-looking I won't mind dinging it up!

That said, if you care about looks, don't mind the longer build time, and don't crash your planes as much as I do, I think you'd be very happy with the HobbyKing fiberglass version. It really is beautifully made.

Here's some shots of the nose and underwing space: