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From News24:
Burglars use toy chopper to steal
2010-02-07 19:33Taipei - Taiwan police have arrested two men accused of using a toy helicopter to search homes before burgling them, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Taipei police arrested Chang Chen-cheng and seized the model aircraft, plus stolen goods, at his home, and are searching for his partner in crime Ah Hsiang.
The pair have allegedly committed a dozen burglaries using the toy helicopter, the Apple Daily said.
According to police, Chang and Ah Hsiang would ride motorbikes in North Taiwan to search for suitable victims, then release the toy radio-controlled helicopter.
The helicopter would fly to the window of an apartment, take photos of the inside of the apartment, and send the images to a computer inside the car.
If the photos revealed there was no one in the apartment, Chang and Ah Hsiang would allegedly break in and carry out the burglary, the Apple Daily said.
The helicopter was powered by a battery and measured 21cm and could remain airborne for 12 minutes - with little noise.
- SAPA
I'm in the process of making a mold for a easystar fuse. I used the replacement foam fuse from the local hobby shop and mounted it to a board, filled the pushrod channels and servo holes on the outside. Fuse plug is painted and waxed.
I must decide where to install hatches (if any). I still have the removable canopy as a seperate part, and will mold the wing insert seperately.
I have been moving forward with my project to build a transverse rotor UAV. Here is a quick overview of this Bell-Hiller concept. (Oh, btw this is only a quick sketch done in Google Sketchup, it isn't totally to scale nor have I drawn in the entire structure)
1) Single brushless motor will drive conter-rotating rotors
2) CCPM swash plate will provide additional level of control including roll-control w/o gyroscopic affects.
3) I am using a Bell-Hiller mixing instead of mounting rotors directly to motors (no swash or flybar) and using large servos to control pitch and roll. This will allow for added inherent stability, and I will be able to use much smaller servos
Next step is to verify this design with the community (you), decide how much I can buy off the shelf vs how much I need to build myself, and then start building and working on the electronics portion. As soon as I know how many servos/sensors I'll need, I'll choose a microcontroller and start that parallel project. Stay tuned, I've told too many people about this project to give up now... :-)
Hear ye! hear ye! On this 5th day of the month of February in the year 2010 it happened, the first get together of the South African Chapter of DIYDrones!
I would say it turned out very successful, starting off very informal then quickly turning in to a storm of ideas lasting quite a few hours. Hopefully the first of many!
Sarel will post some more info on ideas and decisions made.
Thank you to Sarel and Gary!
From left to right: Gary Mortimer, Sarel Wagner (RSA big kahuna), Tiaan Roux.
DIYDrones got a brief mention in an article in Spectrum, the magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The article is about first-person-view (FPV) flying, but the author mentions he read about FPV here and at FPVPilot.com.
MARCY 3 REVEALED
There's the current Marcy 3 plan. Unfortunately not enough space to build her. Basically install a fuselage aroundVika 1. It's obsolete but it was the real Major Marcy's plane & we canuse the tail fins as landing gear. No-one knows if She actually flewone or if She just managed it.
The idea with this is to have panels which bolt onto carbon fiber rodsso she can fly with or without the fuselage. To speed up yaw response,the aft propeller tilts inside its shroud without actually moving theshroud. The aft shroud is probably going to be permanently tilted tosome neutral angle & probably tall enough to cover the propeller atnormal angles.
Forward landing gear is removable for hand launches but notretractable. There's a dome under the nose with a slit for a point &shoot camera to tilt inside of but not pan. Dome has to be strongenough to land on.
Propellers are 12x6 which makes the shroud inner diameter 13". Wings & fuselage between the wings & tail are variable length, probably made of removable sections. Aft fins contain CF rods & are used as landing
gear.
The exact dimensions are a long way from being known. The more rent increases, the smaller she gets. May use aluminum angle rods because
they're longer.
MARCY 2 REVEALED
The next indoor sonar demonstrator, since the monocopter ended up too big & unstable.
Swapped Vika 2's flight computer & shrunk her to the smallest possiblesize to make Marcy 2. She's the smallest vehicle we can make economically. A smaller vehicle using Feigau motors like theParrot demo would be more expensive so it's cheaper to bury our 1 Feigauthan buy 2 more to make a tri rotor. Turnigy/Towerpro 2410-9's are thelow point in motor prices when they're in stock.
Time to get rid of our 3 year old IDG300's. They had troubleinitializing on 1 axis. The pair could still be used in a flat IMU buttheir temperature sensitivity was horrible. Nowadays it's not worthhoarding gyros. They were free samples at a time no-one ever heard ofUAV's. Invensense thought their only use was phone cameras but we knewbetter.
Time to use up the LISY300AL's we got last April in a cube IMU.
MARCY 1 RADIO DISASTERS
The Marcy 1 ground station is basically a scratch built USB radio with 2 channels & a 224khz soundcard, sending 1.8Mbits of telemetry & sonar tothe laptop & 9600bits of commands to the aircraft.
Radio failures explain some of her instability. The Marcy 1 radios havenever performed as well in the fully integrated ground station as theydid in this test:
this-week-in-marcy-1-aviation
They sometimes work & sometimes drop out for no reason. There seems tobe no difference between straight dipoles, impedance matching baluns,plastic enclosures, bare circuit boards, low baud rates, isolatingcapacitors, & choke inductors for Vbus.
These radio parameters improved on the reference software.
Set the AFC range to +15/-16 Fres.
Use the highest receive bandwidth.
Use the highest FSK deviation.
The choke inductor on Vbus got rid of a lot of sonar noise.
Stepped up the remote control to 115000 baud but the flight computeronly has enough horsepower for 86000 baud. Now it's coming down tointerference from through hole parts.
She didn't crash there. It's a radio test.
New 900Mhz -> PCM receiver with a balun.
Without wind & with perfect radio contact she can hover in a smallarea. Cyclic effectiveness ramps up with very small magnitude & seemsto decrease with higher magnitude until she falls out of the sky.
STEVE STABILIZATION
Finally ran a stabilization pass on some Steve Morris helmet cam footage to see if it did any good for helmet cam footage. It looks a bit more like flying than clinging to someone's head but he needs a TASE gimbal & a head tracker.
If you're posting a blog post you'll note that the formatting tools are now much more powerful, allowing for WYSIWYG text and photo entry. No excuse for not having photos, videos and other eye candy! (Seriously, it's a very good idea to start your post with a relevent photo, which hugely increases click-through rates).
The same rich text authoring tools are available in the discussion forum.
This is a good moment to remind everyone about the difference between blog posts and discussion forum posts. Blogs are for information of broad community interest. The discussion forum is for questions, calls for help and n00b whimpers. The blogs are moderated, and we'll delete posts that are not appropriate before they're published. The discussion forum is not moderated before publication, but we may nuke spam or wildly off-topic posts if they show up.
here are some experiences with Bill Premerlani amazing UAVDevBoard on a Multiplex Acromaster.
Here is a video that shows the impressive ability of this device with Ben Levitt pattern stabilization firmware:
UAVDevBoard stabilized Acromaster from Riccardo Kuebler on Vimeo.
The plane, base components:
Acromaster with Apache 30/14T AR
ESC Castle Creation Phoenix 45
Lipo 4S 3600mAh
Propeller APC 12x6
Servos 4x Hitec HS81MG
ACT S3D 2.4GHz 4+2 RC rx
IMU upgrade:
UAVDevBoard
Oilpan
Ublox
Xbee Pro
A123 2S 1300mAh
Here is the options.h file with my actual settings:
options.h
Here is a spreadsheet with the commented history of the settings:
Logbook Acromaster.xls
This is a great work from all the developers and programmers (hardware: Bill Premerlani, Tom Posey; firmware:Bill Premerlani, Adam Barrow, Adam Bellchambers, Pete Holland, Ben Levitt; Aerobatics stabilization firmware: Ben Levitt; and all the fantastic rest of the team).
Best regards,
Ric
1st edit 7.2.10:
link added for autopilot devices, video embedded
Here's what I hope is the final release.
As the new Manual gets formatted, you can view it at: http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot/wiki/ArduPilot25
Until the content is finally moved over the 2.4 manual is still a great resource.
Ardupilot_25_RC2.zip
Bonus - If you look check out the Waypoint_writer_25.pde file in the test suite, you can upload relative waypoints. This isn't supported in the config tool yet.
Jason
UPDATE -
A lot of people were having trouble with the GPS code and LEDs. I reworked the GPS parsers today to iron out some things. They were nothing that would interfere with flight, but I highly recommend using this new version. I've also added the ability to scale down your plane's roll based on airspeed. This should help planes that turn faster when they go slower. We may tweak this a bit in the future, so I'm looking for feedback on it. Note you can always turn it off in your header file with this line:
//6-4
#define AIRSPEED_TURN_P 1
see the header file for more instructions
Septentrio will start shipping its new AsteRx3 receiver in the first quarter of 2010. The AsteRx3 is, a compact multi-frequency GPS/GLONASS/Galileo, and Compass-ready receiver designed for integration in demanding precision positioning, navigation, and automation applications such as land and maritime survey, machine control, UAV payloads, and others.Providing simultaneous access to legacy and modernized GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals on L1, L2, L5, E5a, E5b, and E5 AltBOC, AsteRx3 is a compact and future-proof original equipment manufacture (OEM) receiver on the market, the company said. The receiver has a range of features, collectively known as GNSS+ . ATrack+, Septentrio’s patented Galileo AltBOC tracking, provides low noise tracking and multipath resistance for Galileo’s most advanced signal. LOCK+ tracking guarantees tracking stability under high vibration conditions.The advanced multipath mitigation algorithm APME has been extended for use with the modernized signals, and provides multipath mitigation especially for the predominant and harmful short-delay multipath. AIM+, Septentrio’s Advanced Interference Mitigation technology, protects receivers against in-band interference, and allows users to identify the interference in a “spectrum plot” view. These innovative tracking algorithms are complemented with RTK+ for extended RTK baselines over 50 kilometers as well as faster initialization.“With the evolution of GNSS systems, more and more users demand the possibility to prepare for the benefits these new signals and systems bring,” said Peter Grognard, managing director of Septentrio. “AsteRx3 exploits the capabilities of these signals with our latest ASIC technology. As AsteRx3 is one hundred percent plug-compatible with AsteRx2 and AsteRx2e, the AsteRx family is ideal for system integrators to build solutions which perform optimally with signals available today, which can be migrated to new signals and systems seamlessly tomorrow.”http://www.gpsworld.com/professional-oem/news/septentrio-release-asterx3-compact-gpsglonassgalileo-receiver-9467
