Hi all! In this video the first test of my new heavy CamLifter OktoKopter.
The specs:

- CamLifter Heavy OktoKopter - Carbon frame and landing gear by Klaus Peters (kopter4u.eu)
- Battery holder by Alessandro Parisi (AleBS)
- AltiGator A3536-LE Motors
- APC-E 13x6.5 Props
- HobbyKing 30A ESC (F30A) reflashed with "SimonK Firmware"
- AfroI2C converter
- Mikrokopter flight board
- 3DR Radio 900 MHz telemetry
- FC "hot swap adapter" by Marco Robustini
- 4S 5000 mhA 30C LiPo (x 2)

Using my "hot swap" adapter" I can remove the Mikrokopter board and install ArduCopter APM2 in just two minutes, without remove a single cable.

Bests,

-= Marco =-
(AC Dev Team)

Anyone used this module with APM2 ??? 


Flyport open source WiFi module

http://www.openpicus.com/site/technology/overview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q5dbNigOiQ

I finally got to fly my quad (my first time ever!)

It's scratch built from angle aluminum and running MultiWii on an Arduino Mega. I'm controlling it via PC joystick over Wifi (soon to be controlled by iPhone too) thanks to my serial PPM project over at https://github.com/mattwilliamson/Arduino-RC-Receiver. It's using a WiFly wifi module and an arduino pro mini as the receiver.

Finally my x550 and APM2 quadcopter is complete! And I have successfully flown!. 

Right now I seem to have a bit of  yaw problem, as well as a trim/balance issue. Since the frame is not quite flat it can be hard to tell exactly what should be level, and when I yaw in a different direction, it seems to always return to original. I think I need to check my motor position perpendicularity and possibly PIDs. 

Hi All,

In the flight 31 of my VAnTri, I have had some problems that I didn't find yet in my system.

Fortunatly my cat is inspecting the damage, in order to find an explanation for the crash.

Here I post some photos of his work. If you need his services, contact me!

And a final tip: Why dictionaries are important in the hobby?

Thankfully, DIY Drones says, “Amateur UAVs are non-military and non-commercial.”

Nevertheless, they may be annoying and dangerous.

Both military and civilian attempts at capabilities similar to UAVs wisely included an abort/self-destruct feature to avoid the catastrophic consequences that malfunctions cause.  And where is the “anti-drone” capability – the capability to detect, prevent, intercept, and destroy drones?  Whether a legal, moral, and ethical drone malfunctions or one is designed to be a mal-drone may make little difference to the victims.  Counter-drone capabilities plus laws and prosecution will never be enough.

Consider –

    - A small drone that slowly releases white powder while circling 80,000 people in a stadium

    - A drone that targets the President during a speech on the West Lawn of the White House

    - Using drones, all police cars, armored vehicles, or Senators are located on a Google map

    - Drug smugglers use drones to carry their payload

    - A flock of small drones flies into the engines of an aircraft (from Air Force One to take-your-pick)

    - Exposed, outdoor electrical power facilities are hit at multiple, strategic points

Strategically, responsible UAV enthusiasts are the experts that must produce safe UAVs and anti-UAVs.

As most of you may or may not know, I've been a big proponent of using PPM Sum (aka CPPM) with the Ardupilot since I first figured out how to make it work.  The simplicity of just running a single wire from the Rx to the APM is very attractive.  It eliminates 7 possible failure modes (losing the wire connecting channels 2-8) which could result in loss of control.  There's only 1 wire to get right, but also one wire to get wrong.  Fortunately, the APM can handle complete loss of signal well, and if you set your failsafe to handle complete signal loss, all is good.

I was using this on my HK450GT FBL helicopter, along with a FrSky D8R-SP Rx. Again, as anybody who knows me is aware, I'm a big fan of FrSky radio equipment.  It is affordable, and high performance offering true diversity on the Rx, easy to use CPPM (just requires a jumper on two pins), the Rx is very tolerant of low voltage (it'll keep going LONG after the APM would have shut down, down below 3V).  And rebooting and reacquiring the Tx signal takes less than 1 second.

All of these features are superior to the big name brands, Futaba, Spektrum, etc.

And the telemetry features offered by FrSky is just the icing on the cake.  RSSI (signal strength), Rx voltage, external voltage (flight battery), and even the option for a telemetry hub with all kinds of goodies This is somewhat negated by using an APM, but still, you can put one of these on your Tx and have all the info right at your fingertips.

Anyway, back to my little 450 heli with a HUGE Rx mounted on it, the D8R-SP.

I discovered that FrSky offer a new Rx, the D4Fr which is a small, yet full-range Rx.  And while it only has 4 channels out, it can be configured to do 8-channel CPPM with the simple addition of a jumper! Brilliant, and there's no reason why any modern compact receiver shouldn't be able to do this.  This Rx does not have as many telemetry features as it's big brother.  It can only report RSSI and Rx Voltage, it does not have connectors for the telemetry hub or external voltage.  But that's fine, as the APM can be used to report voltage anyway.  So I ordered one and it arrived Friday.

I started working on setting it up, when the wheels started turning in my brain.  The "case" is just a flimsy plastic thing, almost useless anyway.  And I'm only going to have a single cable going from the Rx to the APM, and it's so small.  And the APM2 has those stand-off pins onto which the daughterboard is soldered.  And those pins are kinda long...  And I've got this piece of empty prototype board sitting around...

Pretty soon I had de-cased the Rx and stripped all the input pins off the APM2.

I soldered the proto-board to the daughter board standoffs, and then glued the Rx board onto the proto-board.  I soldered jumpers on both the Rx and APM2 in order to set both into CPPM mode.  And then I soldered a jumper wire for the CPPM signal, power and ground.  Done.

The complete unit is compact.  There's no wires to get in the way of whatever vibration-damping mount you are using.  There are no wires to come disconnected.  I suspect this setup is at least an order of magnitude more reliable than a standard 8-channel APM2 setup.

Even better, it's compact, and easy to move between vehicles.

If you don’t like to power down your Heli at every battery change, and losing your GPS fix... there is a solution.

Just install a parallel second battery connecter (can be a much smaller one), prepare an old battery with the matching connector and a Diode in the + wire as a backup battery.

(To charge the backup battery you have connect the charger behind the diode)

Before changing the main battery connect the backup to the 2.connecter, change the battery, disconnect the backup and go flying again without loss of GPS fix and so forth.

By the way I had a very successful first flight with my T-Rex450 Pro and APM2

in stabilize mode. Very stable Tail and Hover, unfortunately the weather turned bad I had to stop.

Will keep you posted.

I'm the captain for Team Awesome, the UAS team from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Arizona Campus.  We're headed to the Small UAS competition in Pax River, MD in five days, and we're using an ArduPilot 2.0 equipped airplane. This will be our first year at the competition. We're using the ParkZone Radian powered glider airframe, and the GoPro Hero 2 camera.  

We want to extend a big thanks in advance to the developers of ArduPilot.  We've come a long way in our first year, and we couldn't have done it without you.  

I'll be posting updates from the competition, so stay tuned.  Questions are welcome!

Success! The APM flew the Shrike through it's navigation test perfectly. In addition, we flew it during a VERY windy day (over 20 mph) and stabilize also performed flawlessly. 

Awesome platform guys!

We're adding FPV next and will start doing additional flights & testing starting next week.

See you Saturday,

-Trent & Nick

--Shrike--
APM: http://www.DIYDrones.com
Tx: Flyer9x with er9x firmware by ParkeFlyer http://parkeflyer.com/
Battery: 4.4Ah 30C 3S http://www.hobbypartz.com/77p-sl4400-3s1p-30c-3333.htmlidProduct=6306
Servos: T-Pro 9G http://www.hobbypartz.com/topromisesg9.html 
Motor: Optima 450 2220-1800KV http://www.hobbypartz.com/75m55-optima450-2220-1800kv-2.html
ESC: Exceed RC Proton 30A http://www.hobbypartz.com/07e04-proton-30a.html

Produced by Trent & Nick in Arkansas, USA
Main Camera: Panasonic HDC-TM900K
Video Editing: Final Cut Pro

Good news: HobbyKing is now the official commercial sponsor of the DIY Drones Multicopter Rodeo next Sunday in Boulder, CO after the Sparkfun AVC! They'll be providing prizes, including the cool Talon Hexacopter frame (shown) and gift certificates and t-shirts. 

Thanks to Sparkfun for the Multicopter Rodeo callout this week, too! Everyone is welcome to attend, whether they're participating, observing or just want to hang out with the DIY Drones team. 

Not necessarily practical (or quiet), but definitely unique. Found here. 

 Marcy 2 finally does the 1st step in flight: stabilized rotation on the ground, using the onboard camera & blob detection. Making the RPM slow enough for maximum efficiency makes it too unstable to take off without active control.

It took only 1 week for the super simple ESC to arrive from Hobbyking.  The way to deal with them is to break up an order into segments small enough to ship in 1 week.  Instead of 10 motors on the 4 week shipping plan, create 10 orders on the 1 week shipping plan.

  The evolution of optical targets continues.

It could be passively stable, with landing gear, higher RPM, & more weight.

For now, the lighting is provided by 150W CFL's.

 Next is the hard part: detecting position from the onboard camera in flight.  Exactly how to test it is the hard part.  Coning angle & RPM change depending on altitude & payload.

 In other news, there have been some ideas of going back to ground based vision for Marcy 2 & having a higher quality airborne camera just for viewing.  Blob detection might be good enough to get ground based vision to work in ambient light.

 The ground based camera is smaller than the ground based target & the payload is lighter.  2 cameras on the aircraft for navigation & aerial images are unlikely because of the CPU load.  It would take another chip to serialize the data from 1 camera.

 There's no way to envision 2 cameras with a single chip, but the ground based vision takes a lot more money.  The ground based camera needs the 2 servos & a lot more fabrication than the target & both options need a takeoff stand.

Aerial vision is having real problems with inconsistent light.  Takeoff happens on the ground, so the ground is covered in a shadow.  There are taller takeoff rods.  LEDs don't do white.  They either make everything blue or red.  Only CFL lights produce a real white which can differentiate between red & blue.

There's always requiring the user to fly in a well lit area & lighting the takeoff area with red LEDs.  Most interiors are very dim.  People keep their windows closed & use 60W lights, especially single people.

 The mighty flood fill algorithm from 1980's PC Paint makes another appearance in Marcy 2's blob detection algorithm. It's normally instantaneous with a 160x240 image, but here it has to flood fill hundreds of blob candidates in each image, then take the largest blob. That's very slow.  After much optimization, 25fps of 160x240 takes 10% of a 3.8Ghz processor.

The Marcy 2 algorithm separates a marker from a background with changing viewing angle & lots of noise. Here it's shown separating markers from a lion. The camera is configured to only capture hue & saturation, to reduce the JPEG compression load on the microcontroller.

There was a blob tracking demo in OpenCV, with undoubtedly the same algorithm, somewhere. The demo only seemed to show a difference algorithm with a static background. There wasn't any documentation for any other blob tracker, & 10MB is a bit large for a blob tracking library.

There is a camshift algorithm in OpenCV which might do a better job.  The algorithms have usually not been precise or reliable enough to fly something.  There's a big change going from a Willow Garage robot which takes 30 seconds to move an arm to an unstable aircraft which needs precise, reliable data 4 times a second to avoid crashing.  You also have to be under 25 to use OpenCV.

URB_ERROR resolved

So the mighty USB problem of 3 months was narrowed down to a toggle error, meaning a packet was dropped. No surprise, since it was always the 1st 64 bytes of an 802.11 frame that were missing.

The improvement after keeping the bus busy was because the packets were all multiples of 64 bytes, not the bandwidth.

The breakthrough was noticing the errors only came after packets which were even multiples of 64 bytes.  A hack to only flip the toggle bit after packets of odd multiples of 64 bytes fixed the great stm32f407  URB_ERROR problem.


It was a single line in USB_OTG_USBH_handle_hc_n_In_ISR:

       if(((pdev->host.XferCnt[num] + 64) / 64) % 2)
          pdev->host.hc[num].toggle_in ^= 1;


Ping then became 100% successful, manely limited by RF glitches.  No lockups anywhere, no URB errors, & the promise of full wifi with the microcontroller was finally realized until the next microcontroller comes out.

While simultaneous send & receive still isn't possible, it's not necessary for any of Marcy 2's requirements.

That was a lot of work & a waste of time.  The Wifi settings could have been changed with a much faster ground station protocol.  There's no desire to implement packet spanning in the http protocol.  There's just enough space in a single packet to handle all the configuration pages.

The USB limitations make it impossible to time out while waiting for an ACK, so TCP over wireless is really clunky & doesn't promote a lot of confidence in putting $100 of parts in the air.  The UDP protocol for flight control is bulletproof, but psychological impressions come from TCP.

It's yet another interface to worry about.  The web server only came up because it's the 1st place people think of for configuring the wifi parameters.

DNS & TCP need to be hidden features, enabled by a buried option in the ground station.  A jumper across 2 pins will be required for resetting to factory defaults.  A key for you web based wifi configuration coders: disable the motor until reboot.

The Marcy 2 router package is as complete as can be.  Up to 8 stations are supported.  They can't do anything besides ping, flight control, & the web based configuration.

You should be aware that EVERYONE is in a race to build the 1st personal flying droid.  The winner will happen when the 1st personal position system that actually works appears, setting all 500 of you UAV entrepreneurs off on 30 endless nights promoting your kickstarter accounts, ordering your sparkfun parts, & getting the thing working.

The leading candidates are now based on vision.  The radio, sonar, GPS, & lidar contenders all have problems.  1 thing you may not have thought of is for a personal droid, flying within 10ft of the user, battery power isn't always required.

If it's hovering near someone exercising or shooting video of a talking head in a defined space, it can be tethered.  Tethering gives an element of infinite loitering time that your inductive charging stations can't match.

Quad rotors still seem too expensive to penetrate the mass market.  Those 12x30mm brushless motors are never going to be produced in enough quantities to meet demand while those 7x16.5mm brushed motors don't last long enough. 

A lot of people wanted to know what these proximity passes they see in our videos look like unedited, from top to bottom. So we went through the archives and dug up some we haven't shown yet, and made a quick video. Hope you like it:

My Distributor tell's me that the Easy Star II is in there system ready for some back orders.

• Folding propeller for reduced drag in glider mode
• Protected pod motor mount
• Easily detachable tail plane for ease of transport
• Large internal space with ample room for high capacity LiPo packs

Updated and upgraded, the quick-to-build and easy-to-fly EasyStar II is sure to become one of your favorite models. Based on one of Hitec's most popular aircraft, the original EasyStar, this improved kit boasts larger internal space, more payload capability and optional ailerons. It is designed to accept a powerful brushless motor which makes it a versatile, durable aircraft sure to impress both the beginner and more advanced pilots. Its gentle gliding characteristics and ease of transport make the EasyStar II effortless hobby fun.

$99.99 Free Shipping From Us. :-)

Thanks Paul
Wavetech Rc

Great video of Rano Raraku 3D via Easter Island Statue Project [eisp.org]. DEM and Orthomosaic generation by DroneMapper.com using imagery from Trimble/Gatewing UAV. 140 Images, 30cm GSD final. Cloud processing time was around 1 hour. Animation in ArcScene by Kim Anh Hoang. 

Video 3D RR Flyby

The above image shows the outer quarry and certain Moai statue in 3D. 

You can download the dataset from the following URL: http://dronemapper.com/gatewing1

Enjoy!

I've been looking for a good flying tiny quad for indoor use, and had a chance to look at (but not fly) Chris's Ladybird.  I've been waiting for a sign as to whether or not to get it, and here it is.  I know other people here have been looking for a good quality small indoor quad, so I thought I would mention it here.

I'm interested in the included transmitter, which includes two-way telemetry (not supported by the Ladybird, as far as I can tell).  You can get it with either a Mode 1 or Mode 2 transmitter, or as a bind-and-fly if you already have a Walkera.

Ladybird with Mode 2 Tx

Ladybird with Mode 1 Tx

Ladybird BNF

"The AMA Executive Council has agreed that it may be time to revisit FPV. Many of our members have been forthcoming in offering constructive suggestions about what might be done to modify our current policy so that it is more reflective of what is occurring today in the field. These suggestions will be taken into consideration as we move ahead with the review.

Many prominent members of the FPV community have offered their help. We intend to take advantage of their background and expertise as well."

http://amablog.modelaircraft.org/blog/2012/06/07/the-growing-world-of-first-person-view-model-aviation/

We thought it was about time too take a look at the GCS & Way Point features of the DJI Wookong WKM, the videos posted before have shown just how well the WKM works when used on custom built frames, DJI's own Flame Wheel Frames and now in this video we have stepped it up a little, the WKM has been added to a Droidworx HexaCopter fitted with the AV200 camera mount. This HexaCopter was built for a customer to carry out  aerial survey work, it has been fitted with Axi motors with Hercules Power Boards and the full waypoint option on the DJI WKM flight controller.

As always when it comes to testing we make sure that the conditions are always a challenge, this flight was no different, as you can see from the windsock (which if you watched the last video, the windsock is not destroyed in this video) there is a good "breeze" at the flight field!

The flight was only a very short test to show what the GCS & Way Points could do and what the live telemetry information looks like while the copter was going about its flight plan, once again the WKM delivered without fault and in a very positive and confidence inspiring way. When setting the way points for the flight, care was taken to make sure that the HexaCopter would have to fly across the wind in both directions to see if this caused any issues, and unsurprisingly there were no issues the HexaCopter just carried on as if there were no wind at all!

Once again another outstanding flight from the Wookong WKM and the additional confidence added with GCS & Way Point makes this system a real winner if you are looking to use the system as a serious tool, or just for fun if your budget allows.

Regards

Martin