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Looks like a clone/unbranded DJI 550 frame from HK is avilable for $17.99. Seems like a good price. I just ordered one. Hope the quality is good. Will update everyone, when I get it.
BIG NOTE: It looks like this frame does not have the PDB(Power Distribution Board) built in. I actually like this better, since that means, holes can be drilled without worrying about a short.
UPDATE: June `14th, 2012
The frame has arrive here's some quick pictures:
jDrones News: MultiMount for multicopters.
We are proud to reveal another exciting new product from jDrones. We have been working hard and long with this new product and now finally it is available to all people who need highend mounts for their multicopter needs.
Mount has been designed to use with several widely used arm types. It can be used with round tubes of 10mm and 12mm of diameter. Is also fits on all 10, 12, 15mm square tubes.
Mount have rubber cushions that will make your motors run smoothly and silently. All normal motors that have so called X mount adapter (40mm end-to-end) fits on this mount. First you mount your motor on it's adapter and then adapter mounts on top of MultiMount cushions.
You can also use it on coaxial setups as shown in following picture
For technojunkies we have cool looking installation manual (thanks to Max Levine). Manual that is really clean and easy to follow, it just cannot get any simpler than this.
MultiMount specs:
Set Includes:
You can get them from jDrones Store: MultiMount MMSET2
Design by: Max Levine & jDrones
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Video of Jordi Interview starts at 25:22, and there's a 1 minute non-skippable ad in the beginning]
http://www.wat.tv/video/20-heures-juin-2012-52q2z_2i6xp_.html
Yesterday, in the TV news show of the 1st French chanel TF1, there was some images and comments about the growing trend for drones in US (in particular for real estate agency) with interview of Jordi Munoz (3D Robotics).
I didn't think I'd actually get this far so soon, but somehow I have. I got my APM2 strapped on to my T-Rex 600 and managed to get it in the air. In fact, I've even got it tuned moderately well!
I started out switching the APM from my 3DR quad to the trex frame and began the process of learning how to set up a heli. Being the overbearing fellow I am, I forgot to erase the eeprom so my initial setup was using quad parameters on a heli. After not getting it off the ground, I eventually erased and went through the setup process again and got things right. I got it in the air and tuned a few things and so far I'm happy with how it flies. I used auto-trim mode (ch 7 switch) to level it in the air and that seems to have worked quite well.
The APM board fits nicely in the typical tail gyro place right behind the main shaft. The board is mounted using the Align gel which I've had perfect results with on the quad, and lightweight velcro straps to gently hold it against the gel. No problems with vibrations whatsoever (that I can tell right now, anyway).
I'm happy to have this bird in my fleet once again, and with a second APM (1.0) board on the way I'll hopefully not have to switch back and forth.
Cheers!
Here's another cool idea for the "personal droid" concept that we've been messing around with. Ours uses the built-in "Follow Me" function with ArduCopter and a handheld GPS+3DR radio module to send your GPS coordinate to ArduCopter, but the Parrot AR.Drone doesn't have GPS. So they use a fancy t-shirt and the on-board camera instead!
From New Scientist:
The system, called Joggobot, is being developed by Floyd Mueller and Eberhard Gräther at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia.
The duo plan to allow users to enter their preferred running speed into a smartphone app that controls the drone so it flies ahead of a jogger at just the right pace. Or it could be set to maintain a distance of a few metres no matter what pace a runner is going.
They tested their idea using the foam-fendered AR Drone made by Parrot of Paris, France. Using custom software, they programmed it to follow a bright blue and orange pattern painted on a runner's T-shirt (pictured below).
As soon as an onboard camera sees the shirt, the craft takes off and hovers about a metre off the ground. If it ever loses sight of the pattern, the drone lands automatically.
Mueller says he and Gräther are tinkering with settings to test what motivates runners. "How will people interact with a robotic exercise companion? Should the robot be more like a coach or more like a pet?" he asks. "One might make the exercise more effective, but the other might make it more fun. Which one is 'better'? And is there a 'better'?"
Video here (sadly embedding doesn't work)
(Via sUAS News)
Some nut/genius has taxidermied his cat into a quadcopter
http://io9.com/5915156/this-quadcopter-is-made-from-a-taxidermied-cat
I recently quit my job and have taken a few weeks to decompress. The first thing I did with my down-time was port Arducopter to Flash so I could do development and tuning in an environment that was more developer friendly, faster and fun. This app has real-time plotting of most system variables, almost all AC functions (except mavlink) and repeatable situations so you can tune your quad.
It's a great tool for understanding the actual behavior of Arducopter. I know I've learned a lot. Each sensor is modeled to include noise and delay to ensure accurate behavior of the system. Under the hood, the SIM is running at full rate and all of the timers are stepped in a way that each flight is repeatable. Even the wind will repeat exactly with each run.
I'm also taking support donations to help offset my many many hours spent on this tool. I hope you like it and I hope it helps you fly safer and save a few props.
Arducopter Sim will live at http://www.jasonshort.com/ for now.
We are a small team committed to launch soon new economical and innovative solutions on the market of Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV/UAS).
We would ask your cooperation on this project responding to this short survey and sharing the link with people who might be interested.
CLICK HERE TO BEGIN THE SURVEY!
We give a great importance to Crowdsourcing and this will permit to create new systems to meet your requirements.
This survey takes no more than 10 minutes, contains a short intro video. Please respond before 30-06-2012.
Thank you for your precious collaboration.
Aeroazores Team
After months of planning, hard work, setbacks, training, re-design, fabrication and construction, DroneJournalism.org today successfully launched and flew JournoDrone 2.
The drone eventually will be equipped with an Arduino-based autopilot (APM 2.0) and cameras to collect aerial photography and aerial photomaps for use in journalism investigations. Sunday, June 3 was a basic shakedown of the airframe, without autopilot or sensors, to prove the airworthiness of the drone.
While the airframe proved slightly heavy and unpredictable at times, our indication is with some modification it will be a competent flyer for our purposes.
JournoDrone 2 is based on the "FPV Raptor" radio controlled airplane with some important modifications, the most important of which is carbon fiber-reinforced fuselage. The airplane had a fairly good track record as a First Person Video drone, so we didn't feel that we needed to change the layout of the craft. Yet we needed to have an extra layer of security to make it more of a "tool" rather than "toy."
While we had some initial concerns about weight gain, the two layers of carbon fiber and epoxy proved its worth when the aircraft experienced a sudden gust of wind in its second flight and crashed. While the impact separated the motor pod, chipped the propellor, bent the motor shaft, and cracked the casing of an on-board camera, the fuselage was totally unscathed. We were not able to recover the on-board video of that second flight.
A big hand to University of Illinois physics professor Mats Selen, who not only is an RC expert who not only helped immensely with the setup, balancing, and repair, but also provided his piloting expertise for the first flight. He's pictured in the right on the topmost photo.
Mats and I, along with fellow DroneJournalism.org developer and UIUC GSLIS PhD candidate Acton Gorton, are using this learning experience to help our Drones for Schools initiative. Through National Science Foundation (NSF) Math Science Partnershi (MSP) grant, EnLiST, we hope to better STEM education by giving high school students the opportunity to build and program these drones in the classroom and use them to provide aerial intelligence in their communities.
Here's the video from the ground of that first (short) flight:
I've been a big fan of the Parrot AR.Drone since it was first released in early 2010. Although it's not a real drone as we define it (capable of autonomy) since it doesn't have GPS or a navigation function, it is a remarkable piece of engineering and I think of it as the "gateway drug" to real UAVs. I've heard that more than a 100,000 have been sold, and many of those users will catch the bug and want more, bringing them to communities likes this one and the more sophisticated UAVs discussed here.
Parrot has been kind enough to send me review units of both the original AR.Drone and now the new AR.Drone 2.0, which was released last month ($299). The 2.0 version adds:
Indoors, the main advantage is the better camera and the pressure sensor means that it doesn't bounce up when it flies over furniture, the way the sonar-only AR.Drone 1 did.
Outdoors, the advantages are more obvious. I flew it last weekend with the Bay Area crew (see post here) in some pretty stiff wind and we were all very impressed. Here are some quick observations:
Overall, I think the 2.0 version is a significant improvement. The new HD camera is the biggest win and the indoor altitude hold performance is much improved by the baro sensor. Outdoors, I think the advantages of the higher altitude option are not as great as they could be, due to the Wifi range limits, but it does widen its performance range somewhat.
For people who don't already have a Parrot AR.Drone, the improvements in 2.0 definitely make it more attractive. If you've been waiting to get one, now's the time. But if you've already got a 1.0, you may not find them quite enough to upgrade.
As before, the AR.Drone is really optimized for indoor use, and it's hard to find a better platform for that, from stability to reliability and safety (relatively soft props and a foam protective ring). I think you'll see more and more people using the basic frame for indoor automomy research with replacement controller boards.
Bottom line: it really is a beautiful bit of engineering and design and an inspiration to us all in terms of ease-of-use.
UPDATE: here's a video of someone flying 300ft away. They must have a cleaner wifi environment than I did!
Hello to all,
I used a part of the Ardupilot legacy software plus code from Melih Karakelle and from Dennis Frie and "build" around an Open DIY Antenna Tracker - OpenDiyAT.
It needs only sentences from a gps receiver unit (gprmc and gpgga) and it sends the telemetry to the ground using the audio link of our video transmitter.
It is now in a very reliable form, and it has still a good development base.
With some work, we can increase the telemetry data to send to the ground base.
I publish the code here: http://code.google.com/p/opendiyantracker/
The project is open and I hope the RC community can embrace this and help to develop the code (what so far didn't happen, which made me sad with the lack of interest).
This is today video update , new Automatic mission with more detail during the flight. This video is better of first doing yesterday :)
In my test i using MP32F4 + NAVY2012 (ARM rev.) the revision of code is 2.5.5 Mission planner is 1.1.9
My quad is a 330x is not so good for fly in the wind :( But i fly well my first automatic mission :)
This is the discussion thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/how-work-and-setup-of-automatic-function-altitude-hold-loiter-aut?xg_source=activity
I doing the recording of waypoiny using the switch that is possible configure on mission planner on channel 7.
Before to start to recording is possible to delete the waypoiny in eeprom with Disarmed Motor , then switch in AUTO mode and selected then switch channel 7 the same that you use for add new waypoint.
So then you go in stabilize mode and fly where you want to put first point , second ecc until last.
When you switch on eeprom write lat lon and altitude for every point. Keep atention that in first point the quad doing a strange roll fasta change ready to controll the quad.
When you put in Auto Mode , the quad rotate his noose towards the next waypoint , don't worry :) The important is that you know how control the quad if you need to return in stabilize manual mode :)
This is the quality of auto navigation in a windy day on waypoint i see an max error of 2-3 m
At the end of flight i download my log and convert it in KMZ file and check it in Google Earth. For check the quality of flight i save the waypoint and then i prepare manually a KMZ and import it in the Google earth.
In my test i verify that hit waypoint with an error 2-3 m . I think that it's good :)
A new challenge for PLAYMOBIL! arducopter with (2.5.5) An idea (not too heavy) and (not expensive 11euros) to better visualize my quad because I really find it hard to know the flight oriention model.Annuler les modifications
After arriving in Nome, AK for the summer, I got the HK EPP FPV re-assembled and took it for a spin early in the morning (1:00 AM). With my APM 2.0 tied up with the heli right now, I'm still flying this thing manually (considering getting my hands on another APM). I have, however made a few modifications to the frame to make it more modular (for ease of transportation) and more efficient. I'll be posting those mods soon. For now, enjoy the waves!
Can you spot a piece of the burst balloon against the total blackness of space at 100,000 ft. ?
You can also see how thin our atmosphere is !
See the curvature of the earth.
The wire with silicone at the end is part of the 2M APRS antenna. The white things are parts of the burst balloon.
Did anyone see the balloon track on APRS.FI on the internet on Tuesday 5/29/2012 at 9 pm ? Callsign is ke5vsh-1 if you want to see the track.
The 3D radios on 433mhz worked well all the way sending APM2 data down. I will try to post some of the data. The temp inside our package was from 86 to -15 degrees from launch to touchdown.
I will give links to the Top,Side,and Bottom cameras when the files get uploaded.
Another great flight ! Now going to launch the 7 ft. 8x glider with APM2 in it for a RTL and maybe an autonomous landing in about 2 weeks. The test flight is only to 30,000 ft. to test everything out. If all goes well we will launch the glider every 2 weeks with scientific packages on board.
I sure hope the RTL will work because we spent 5 hours in the hot desert retrieving this last shot ! My director says the APM2 RTL would be sooo much better. I will keep you posted.
All this work is by Cosmiac LLC funded by NASA and the University of New Mexico.
Earl
Ning (the platform we're hosted on) has just rolled out a new mobile interface in beta, which I've enabled. The main screen is the Activity Feed, with the various content categories available as menu items. Please give it a try on your phone and let me know what you think. (I can't change it, but I can give the Ning team feedback).
From Hackaday:
Like most people out there, we’re fascinated by these little buzzing and hovering quadrotors. We’ve really enjoyed the recent trend of miniaturizing them and using PCBs as the frame itself. As [scolton] points out in his instructible, his isn’t the first, the smallest, or the lightest, but he does have some great information and a few tricks up his sleeve that make this a fun project to check out. The 4pcb measures 6.5 inches from motor shaft to motor shaft diagonally. It weighs 138 grams and, with its current batteries,can fly for roughly 8 minutes.
A nice thing about the 4pcb is that it includes brushless motor drivers into the design. Apparently that isn’t very common. What we really like though is the massive amount of reference material [scolton] provides. Not only could you download everything necessary to recreate his work, he links to so many other projects and resources you could probably expand in any direction your heart desires. If you’re considering a quadcopter build in the near future, you might want to bookmark this one.
Bodge work continues, in the pursuit of supplying the required current in the smallest possible space. The LM1117 was the only thing available locally. It makes 3.25V at 800mA with a 1.3V dropout & no other components. A single one wasn't enough.
The double stack still got hot enough to burn a human. Meeting the size & weight requirements makes for some bleeding edge temperatures.
That ended up failing after a few minutes, leading back to the old TO-220.
It would be a lot cheaper to calculate the required current, voltage drop, thermal dissipation of the board, & get the exact right part.
Once you start pouring out heat to get the required power in the required space, the hot glue starts melting. This has become disastrous in sunlight. A hotter hot glue is required.
Anyways, after some time chasing after the lack of motor pulsing on Marcy 2, found the Castle Creations 6 is giving different results than the Castle Creations 9. 1 of the mane reasons people design their own ESC's is these inconsistencies. Response rate, maximum duty cycle, different deglitching algorithms are the mane problems. They all accept 200Hz. The deglitching may slow down the response rate.
Every ESC over 6A gave instant response, including Castle Creations & Hobbyking. The leading theory is overloading, causing it to pull back when the throttle change is too big. The 6A hesitates during throttle increases while the 9A instantly spins up. Castle Creations are too expensive to buy another 9A & the 10A from Hobbyking takes 1 month to deliver.
Was surprised to find 3drobotics does not sell an open source ESC as rumored. They sell a 20A m2mpower ESC.
The mikrokopter ESC is the only complete source code & very specific about not being licensed for commercial use.
There is an SIlabs reference design. It's quite simple.
The fact is you can't undercut hobbyking, which makes any home made ESC fruitless.
The lack of an ESC & no desire to break down Marcy 1 for her ESC led to implementing things which make Marcy 2 a product more than a science project, manely a full router stack. ARP, ICMP, DHCP, & DNS were the big ones. The mane dictator over all this is the high USB error rate, causing many packets to be lost.
DNS was a real painful implementation of a luxury. It destroys the realtime performance. It's too slow to ever be used, but a host name looks neater in a ping command than an address.
Marcy 2 takes your computer off the internet & puts you on her own isolated network in domain heroinewarrior.com.
The access point now supports 8 stations, with flight control possible from any IP address. In the battle of the router, DNS was voted off the stack. It worked, but was the only protocol which had response packet length determined by the user. Some packet lengths caused yet another USB crash. So DNS now sends a fixed size response. If the domain name is too big, it's truncated.
Even without that crash, the URB_ERRORs make all the protocols unbearably slow. ASSOC, DHCP, & ARP are pretty bad but only happen once. The only way to make the experience fast enough is to limit communication to the flight protocol. There's no way to have a web page for configuration.
The URB_ERRORs on the STM32F4 drop when the pipeline is kept busy. In full operation, streaming 2 megabit video, there are almost no errors & the IP stack always works. Another method is to poll the interrupt endpoint graciously provided by the RTL8192. This always returns immediately. The interrupts are absolutely useless, but they keep the pipeline busy enough to reduce the errors.
Sort of disappointing to go through all the trouble of supporting a USB dongle only to have it be incapable of basic IP protocols. Since the USB core on the STM32F4 is a stock core from Synopsis, there's always hope it really works, but so far it still seems intended for a mass storage device, where the reads are always guaranteed to happen right after a write.
The money for a smartphone is still too far off. All roads are now leading to iOS & then porting to Android when iOS usage falls off. It's unavoidable, since iOS is the only thing which is guaranteed to work. Android has zillions of incompatible pieces of hardware.
The real problem is how iOS is only supported on 2 gadgets: 1 phone & 1 tablet, each updated only once a year.
Chris needed to do some prep for the upcoming SparkFun Challenge, so he asked if anybody wanted to get together for a Memorial Day fly-in. I drove up with Andreas and Charlie Burtoff; there were about 15-20(?) people all together, although I didn't actually count.
Here's a shakycam of Andreas flying the Zii, a hex, some of the flyers, and Andreas with his fine-looking FPV mask.
http://eastbay-rc.blogspot.com/2012/06/short-clip-of-recent-diy-drones-fly-in.html
Hi all,
many of us are using EagleTree data recorder. Sometimes I have several logs that I need to merge between the autopilots and EagleTree. The manual states that you can contact them about file format and they will respond. Unfortunately this is not the case. Therefore maybe somebody has a clue about what the file content means:
TESTPLANE
0 0 0 255 1 0 0 0 255 1 254 0 0 1 0 0 0 255 0 0 0 1 100 74 1536 10.04 8205 1 1073758292
All Sessions
0 19456
Session 1
0 19456
Milliseconds IsEvent EventError EventData Altitude Airspeed ServoCurrent*100 Throttle PackVolt*100 Amps*100 GForceX*100 GForceY*100 GForceZ*100 Temp1*10 Temp2*10 Temp3*10 RPM RPM2 GPSLat GPSLon GPSAlt GPSSpeed GPSCourse GPSDist GPSUTC NumSats GPSFlags SpektrumHolds SpektrumLostFrames SpektrumAFades SpektrumBFades SpektrumLeftFades SpektrumRightFades GPSUTC-ASCII HDOP*10
0 1 9 14 0 0 0 0 1265 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.000000000000 0.000000000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 04/06/2012,01:00:00.89 0
100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1265 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.000000000000 0.000000000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 04/06/2012,01:00:00.89 0
200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1265 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.000000000000 0.000000000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 04/06/2012,01:00:00.89 0
300 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1265 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.000000000000 0.000000000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 04/06/2012,01:00:00.89 0
400 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1265 48 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.000000000000 0.000000000000 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 04/06/2012,01:00:00.89 0
Obviously 19456 is just the number of samples, the rest are easily decoded ASCII data, but the line in BOLD contains some magic flags and options, one of them is related to time step. Any ideas?
EDIT: The field in red is milliseconds timestep size, it accepts .6 format also, and Milliseconds from the first column are ignored.
Not sure if the application can plot precisely timesteps like 333.333333 or will just truncate to 333.
Other fields remain a mystery.
BTW somebody mentioned
but it doesn't explain beyond:
Second Line: Data about your model’s setup, in an internal.
This line is needed to allow sharing of your data files with others.
Oh yes, for sure.
It also adds
Email us if you need more information on the file format.
Without promise of answering to that mail.
PLEASE POST HERE YOUR RECORDINGS *.FDR SO I CAN PICK DIFFERENCES COMING FROM DIFFERENT SOFTWARE VERSIONS - IT WILL BE EASIER TO REVERSE-ENGINEER THIS WAY.
