Blogs

Blair documented this project in incredible detail @ http://www.blairkelly.ca/2012/04/20/arduino-wifly-mini/

The mainstream news stories about UAVs getting into the NAS are almost getting commonplace, and maybe that's partly the idea of this post, i.e. to point that out.  Still, maybe we should stay on top of what's being said.

One problem with these short radio spots, in this case seven minutes with two guests, is that you just can't get into the details.  Not a whole lot can can be said past "drones can be good, drones can be bad."  Still, these sound bites are what the general public is hearing and reacting to.  This particular radio show, I'm told, is heard by over 500,000 people across the U.S.

If you go to the page, the audio link to hear the spot is just above the Predator image.  Click HERE.

Paul

Nothing to do with UAVs (and the "APM" thing is just a coincidence), but I thought I'd pass it along anyway as a great example of human/robot interaction. The autononous farm vehicle does the driving while the worker does the cutting. 

(via Missy Cummings)

Testing ducted fan quad, flies great.  My intention was to build a tricopter but just had to see how a quad would fly with 90mm EDF's.  Also tested as a "V-Tail" in the quad configeration, it flies with a 15 degree rear facing angle and is more sensitive to inputs. 

After painfully waiting for the Alaskan spring time to do its thing, I've finally got my 3DR quad all set up and FPV-capable.

I managed to get some test runs in beginning in April to get the hang of flying a quad. It's been cold so I haven't done nearly as much as I'd have liked to. On the other hand, snow drifts make good places to bail. ;) Now that things are melting and warming up a bit, I've managed to find some time to add more junk to the frame. Here are the current specs:

3DR Quad Frame
RCTimer 880kv motors
RCTimer 40amp ESC's
12x4.5 Carbon/Nylon Blades
APM 2.0 (currently on 2.5.4)

Turnigy TH9x (with er9x firmware)
ChainLink Dare UHF Long-Range Tx/Rx (433MHz)
FatShark 2.4GHz video transmitter
GoPro HD Hero 2
Custom camera mount (temporary. whipped up in an afternoon)

I'm using the ChainLink since the only video tx I have is the FatShark 2.4Ghz. All of this seems to work quite well.

I have the GoPro plugged into the video tx so I can record and fly FPV at the same time via the same camera. The GoPro is sitting on a slab of Align gel which does a good job of killing the jello with 1080p@30fps. My APM2 Board is also on Align gel, held in place gently with velcro - just enough to keep it from un-seating from the gel but not enough to negate the vibration dampening.

I'm well-aware of the ghastly mess of wires protruding in all directions. This has very much been a dynamic build, adding and securing parts as I go along, seeing what fits best where. At some point I'm sure I'll put in the effort to neatly zip-tie all the wires where they ought to be and dump some aesthetic quality into the thing. For now, it works and does what I want.

The main goals now are to delve into the art of FPV flying and fiddle with PIDs to try to get the thing to fly solidly. Hopefully the refinement of loiter and the other auto modes will prove successful, since I've had poor luck with those to date.

Cheers, and happy flying!

Eric

Yesterday I received issue 30 of Make Magazine, and on the cover of the magazine there was a big "RC Stunt Plane".

It seems a super-cheap platform on which building a frame for testing arduplane on: the frame is basically extruded polystyrene insulation board with a reinforced area to host all electronics and motor.

For those who haven't received the issue yet, here is the link to the page with the step by step instructions: http://makeprojects.com/Project/-The-Towel-R-C-Stunt-Plane/2042/1

This project has been developed by the The Brooklyn Aerodrome rc plane club, and besides the tutorial on MakeProjects you can look on their site a lot of other video tutorials, and see the updated part list.

Personally, now that I have 2 APM (v1 and v2) I could use the old one to build a plane, and I was wondering if that frame was good enough for using with the ardupilot or was too open for hosting it. 

But I'll try collect some spare parts I have and see if I can make it fly: only big problem is that in Europe house are built "properly" :) , so that kind of polystyrene will be pretty difficult to find around. 

But I'll try and see if I can keep you updated with fitting the APM on this frame.

While I am trying to decide on several dual axis camera mount options for the GoPro HD Hero2 and other cameras, I have come up with a very simple direct mount for the GoPro.  Whilst not ideal, it has allowed me to enjoy the camera and capture a few flights with my medium lift arducopter quad.  If you have not spotted it already I have used the reinforced light plastic display base that the camera is sitting on when it comes from GoPro boxed up.  In fact the the camera properly clips into the base and the only modification I made was to put a small square of electrical tape on the base of the camera mount where it slides in to stop it rattling in flight.

I drilled two holes which match one side of the Jdrones battery mount and two others that match the centre frame; which can be seen in the next photo.

Given the great flight stability from the current arducopter code you can operate in either X or + mode, but the camera does sit in nicely forward for X frame setups.  At the moment I am still flying with the + alignment and the camera hangs to one side which gives nice side on flyby footage. Since I am well below the maximum payload lift at the moment, the motors compensate easily for the slightly offset camera weight.  The next photo of my quad makes this a little clearer in terms of the camera mount position. You can see the black tape on the forward pointing motor arm.

Here is is youtube video I shot over the weekend at our local (Namagi) Heli flying field.  I ended up being surrounded by cows who unexpectedly moved towards me and seemed to be very interested in the Arducopter quad.  Perhaps some potential new multi-copter customers :-)  Sorry I could not resist adding a partial  audio track to the video. At the end of the video it looks like I am flying but actually I am carrying the copter towards the cow.  Enjoy

Below I have added one more photo showing the arducopter battery mounted in the normal position.  This is not really offsetting the camera weight but my quad is flying nice and level with no obvious issues.  The ideal setup would be to rotate the battery mount so the battery is offset and inline with the camera mount over the CG.  I will be changing to this setup shortly.  To be honest I just wanted to test the camera out and have a secure mount.  I will now refine the mount so it looks a little better and balances the flying platform.

If you don't have dreams of launching a UAV project on kickstarter, making zillions of dollars, & quitting your unemployment compensation, you're crazy.  So here's a quick graph of kickstarter funding for "currently funding" LA projects, which is the easiest data to find on their mane page. This was the only easily copyable data set & includes all the future unsuccessful & successful projects.

Out of 334 projects, most of them are getting from 0 to $5000.  There's a definite preference among the crowd to cluster above $15,000 & avoid below $15,000.  The top 24 projects earn more than the sum of the bottom 310 projects & the top 4 of projects own 19% of the total wealth.

It's definitely flatter than wealth distributed by the government, but even with the crowd, the trend is definitely the same.  You see the same trend of concentration of wealth near the very top in food, longevity, dating & marriage.  It's hard to beat biologically wired behavior.

 Assuming you want something to break even & you're American, so you're probably unemployed, you need around $2000 to pay 1 month of the cost of living + the cost of parts in the widget + taxes.


Kickstarter takes 5% of the cut for their CEO running a server & Jeff Bezos charges another 5% for being Jeff Bezos credit card processing.  Anything not spent on your own business expenses, kickstarter reports to the IRS as ordinary income, so you have to pay another 10-30% in taxes.  Fortunately, if you're American, your taxes should be under 10% because you're unemployed.

If your cost of living is your margin & you shoot for no profit, you're looking at $400 of taxes + $2000 to survive + parts, for every month it takes to produce the thing. 


If it takes 1 month to finish all the orders & the widget has no parts, you need to be better than 29% of the projects.  In reality, nothing is finished in 1 month.

For a real focused job, a real simple widget, producing exactly what the customers want & no diversion to your own needs, you're looking at 3 months or $7200.  Attopilot took at least a year or over $28,800 just for the cost of living + taxes.  Only the top 2% make that much on kickstarter.

 The money is conceivably easier, but how many of those kickstarter investments are really due to kickstarter clicks & not people the maker didn't already have a network with or the maker worked his ass off selling to?

At least 1 investment is going to be from the mother.  I suspect most of the money is coming from pavement pounding sales.  Kickstarter of course, would insist that all the money was because of clicks.

As a way to replace your day job, fuggedaboutit.  As supplimental income on top of a day job, it's certainly there.  You won't make as much on kickstarter as you would putting the same amount of time into a day job, but it could certainly allow you to build something.

It may not allow you to think very far outside the box.  Unless you're Steve Jobless, people don't buy stuff that's too different.  What could be real crazy if you went with your own money has to be a bit more conforming to get someone else to pay in advance.

There's never a free lunch.  When you ask for advance payments, you have to deliver what customers think they want & that is never exactly what you want.  You always have to give up some freedom to get someone else to take the risk, whether it's a crowd or a government.

The final episode of the TBS Road Trip takes us to San Francisco Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, Russian Hill, Alcatraz and various other sights around San Francisco.

The journey ends with a big bang, two intense weeks filled with crazy flying, an armed robbery. tons of junk food and very little sleep. Hope we can do this as soon as possible in a similar country.

From Wired's DangerRoom site.

On April 30, the Navy awarded Aerovel a second development contract to improve the Flexrotor’s engine and remote controls. The ultimate goal is to develop a version of the ‘bot equipped with sensors and capable of operating from small ships. “With Flexrotor, the two biggest benefits to sailors and Marines would be the ability to do extended maritime surveillance from a ship, and to do so with a small footprint,” said ONR’s John Kinzer.

As depicted in the video above, the Flexrotor takes off vertically like a helicopter, propelled by its roughly five-foot, tip-mounted rotor. Once it climbs high enough, small winglets pop out of the robot’s tail end and it tips over and dives, transferring lift from its rotors to its 10-foot-wide wing mounted in the middle of the tube-shaped body. The rotor becomes a propeller, and Flexrotor cruises along like any conventional airplane. The first drone’s first test transition between copter and plane modes took place in August.

This blog record is about using Carambola with Arducotper to get live telemetry data from quadcopter.

Carambola is low cost, open-source WiFi (21.5 dB / 2.4GHz) embeddable platform from 8devices. I have decided to use this board to control arducopter from computer. In order to have reliable link I have used two Carambolas. One as AP (on the quadcopter) other as Client (ground station). Mission planner connects to arducopter via bridge created by these boards.

Because article is pretty long I did not re-posted it here. Read full post here http://lukse.lt/uzrasai/2012-05-carambola-powered-quadcoper/

After beta testing in early 2011 I had some bad crashes and my concept of precise machined and glued carbon did not pay off. It was almost impossible to replace broken parts. This made me think of a different concept.

Few parts that can be used all over the frame.

All parts easy replacable.

Stiff construction.

Ok, it took me a while but now the parts are ready for assembly.

And this is the main part:

It's thunderstorming here in Wisconsin today so I thought I share my latest video shot from my Xaircraft X650 V-8 using a GoPro camera on a fixed mount.  Very stable platform even when NOT using the $300.00 2 or 3 axis camera mount.  My mount cost less than $2.00 to make using a couple pieces of colorplast and a flat GoPro mount.  What do you think?

John Villasenor of the Brookings Institute gets a bit of stick in these parts for his op-eds on drones (in part for some sweeping statements and fuzzy terminology), but I've always found him to be responsible, happy to learn and engage in dialog here and otherwise worth reading.

Here's his recent op-ed in the Washington Post, which makes the good point that the FAA, which is charged with bringing commercial drones into the National Air Space, is not the right agency to consider the privacy implications of that. This is, of course, self-evident to anyone following this area and such privacy issues are almost always handled by other agencies as well as the courts, but the op-ed is worth reading if for no other reason than a good summary of where things stand in the US regarding new issues that drone may present on privacy.

Here's the lead:

In February, President Obama signed into law a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that requires the agency — on a fairly rapid schedule — to write rules opening U.S. airspace to unmanned aerial vehicles. This puts the FAA at the center of a potentially dramatic set of policy changes that stand to usher in a long list of direct and indirect benefits. But the FAA is not a privacy agency. And although real privacy concerns have arisen about these aircraft, asking the agency to take on the role of privacy czar for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would be a mistake.

Frame Material:

3/4" x 3x4" fir stick for the arms  (8 feet is enough)

Plywood for the center plate (~ 6"x18*)

Machine screws & bolts

6 Wiffle balls

Lots of cable binders

Dimensions:

26" Motor to motor (can fit 10", 11" and 12" props)

6" Hexagon as the center plate (3 times)

Finished weight is about 5.5 lbs. (With my quad and the same build method and motors I was able to lift 8 lbs payload using 4S).

Build time for entire copter: 4 hours

Eletronics:

APM2

9x with FrSky module and receiver

2x 4000mAh 3S, one powering 3 ESCs each (in a triangle, I'm hoping it could fly with only 3 motors in emergency)

6x 40A Turnigy Plush

6x NTM 35 1100 KV

10"x4.5" Props

Center plate pattern, drawn with Visio:

Pattern is super-glued on plywood and used to cut plates and glue arms in correct position.

Arms with center plate sandwich:

Power distribution level, will be covered with a third center plate:

Finished Hexacopter, maiden flight in the basement was successful. Will need some PID tuning. The noise is quite something ;)

Construction:

Print hexagon pattern with arm orientation
Glue pattern on plywood
Use miter-saw to cut hexagons
Cut arms, one 28.5", four 13.5"
Super glue arms on one plywood plate matching arm pattern
Super glue second hexagon plate
Drill holes for machine screw and fasten
Drill holes for motors, 2 holes for each motor make sure distance to center is equal
Build power distribution with spider method (strip cables in middle, pull one cable through the other and solder. This yield a 4-end distribution, perfect for the hexa, 3 for ESCs and one for the battery, build 2 each)
Cover power distribution layer with another center plate
Attach motors, ESCs
Insert APM, receiver and batteries
Fly

We did some testing of the Raptor in the wind - stronger than we've ever done before and had some very compelling results: flying wings (or at least the Raptor) do awesome in the wind, i.e. hold a fairly good heading and can withstand most jarring. The Nova in the same situation could have been disastrous.

We also continued our effort to finish the Shrike - a flying wing w/ a fuselage that will be powered by an APM2.

See you Wednesday!

-Trent & Nick

--Raptor--

Battery: 20C 2.2Ah Sky http://www.hobbypartz.com/77p-sl2200-3s1p-20c-3333.html

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: iMovie

I've been working on an ARM based quadcopter over the past several weeks.  It utilizes a custom sensor pcb that is essentially a break-out board of break-out boards from Sparkfun.  The custom pcb also serves as power distribution to the motors.  The MCU is an NXP LPC1768.  It utilizes the NGX "Blueboard" development board.  I've made all the firmware and hardware design available on sourceforge.   The source includes NXP peripheral drivers modified to compile in library form.  It also includes my implementation of CDC EEM Ethernet Emulation over USB.  EEM only works on Linux right now.  I would really appreciate it someone could help me get that working on Windows and Mac. The firmware also includes compatibility with my 50-channel frequency hopping radio designs for long-range Mavlink support over RF and Ethernet.  I have a large part of the Mavlink protocol implemented, but still need to add waypoint storage support.   The firmware also serves as an example of interfacing NXP with gyros, accelerometers, magnetometer, ultrasonic, GPS, motor controllers, RC control input.  Currently, I'm using the Madgwick DCM algorithm for attitude.  I'm still trying to get my head around the Kalman filter.  I'm starting a new job next week, so I won't have as much time to play with this thing.

Some videos capturing the development of the quad here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSiWjf5sNuUIE5q7Ymw0ZqQ

Here is the sourceforge project page:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/armquadvwr/

SVN access to code only (no zip file downloads)

svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/armquadvwr/code/trunk armquadvwr-code

Then, assuming you have a gcc arm toolchain configured  edit  armquadvwr-code/makedefs PREFIX to point to your toolchain.  Then:

cd armquadvwr-code

make clean

make

That should build the peripheral driver library and project code.   If anyone wants to add a nice Kalman filter / quaternion attitude implementation to the project,  I would appreciate it :)

Looks like a kinda complicated print, but here it is. More details here (it's Arduino based)

This is a new-platform from a Spanish start-up called Intelligenia Dynamics. It has four double co-axial motor/propellers and it is part of their upcoming product line of commercial uavs and services. You can read more at their website: http://www.iuavs.com/en/pages/index

(via robots.net / Robots Podcast news )

The new Hobbyking X550 frame is a high quality folding-arm quadcopter frame that offers great looks and performance.  Built from light weight yet rigid glass fiber and aluminum, the X550 offers a great combination of weight savings and strength.

This quad features folding arms which make it easy to transport and store. The arms are also two different colors for orientation, silver and red, so its easy to keep your quad flying in the right direction.

All necessary hardware is included, just add your own electronics.

 
Specifications:
Width: 550mm
Motor Bolt Holes: 19mm width

More information here: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewitem.asp?idproduct=24151