A couple of friends from Slovenia invited us to the wonderful Triglav National Reserve. We got filming and R/C flying permits for the day we were there, slept in a beautiful and very peaceful hut in the middle of the national reserve, and played a little bit with our toys :) aufmschlau.ch was kind enough to put together a video of the weekend. Enjoy!
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Love the yoga ball as a soft landing device, can't believe the pilot trusted his life to an RC controller though and he never had covers for all those props which would have sliced him up like a blender if things went pear shaped.
Awesome stuff, just totally jealous as we are trying something similar and they flew first :-)
We have had our first snow storm here in Colorado, and the furnaces are definitely running, so it seems like a good time for my annual ESD Public Service Announcement.
What is ESD? Electrostatic Discharge! That little spark you sometimes get when you touch a light switch or some other grounded object. Electrostatic discharge is always an issue when working with electronic equipment, but is a particular problem during the winter months due to dry indoor air. When low temperature outside air enters a building and is heated the relative humidity drops considerably. Dry air conditions increase static charge buildup.
Why should you care? Well, if you are working with APM and build a large static charge on your person, then transfer that charge to APM (which may (or may not) be signaled by your touching it being accompanied by a spark), that may cause damage to the autopilot. The hardware multiplexor on APM is particularly susceptible to damage from ESD, but many other components can be damaged as well.
How can you avoid damage from ESD? There are a variety of products and techniques that can help. Best practices would include using an anti-static mat on your work surface and using a wrist strap to ground your body to the mat when working on APM. However, simpler, lower cost things can help a lot. Pay attention to what clothes you are wearing when working on APM. You may want to remove your fleece jacket or wool sweater. When I sit down to work with APM I try to momentarily ground myself when first sitting down at my bench to drain any accumulated charge I am carrying, and do so every time I leave and come back to the bench. Also, there are a variety of household anti-static products that can be very effective in lowering the amount of static charge you pick up. I use an aerosol anti-static product that will treat a room with a few seconds spray, and which will last several days.
Like they say - "An ounce of prevention...."
I Heart Robotics has a great report from the recent IROS conference on the latest from Ascending Technologies, which make the most popular multicopters used in academia. Not open source and outside of the price range of most in this community, but excellent technology and perhaps some ideas we can use here:
At their booth they had a Falcon 8 on display, which is an eight rotor sUAS designed for aerial photography and surveying.
Ascending Technologies also brought along some of their newer products including the Firefly and the Mastermind. The Firefly has several notable design features that make is a great research platform.First, the Firefly includes an easy to see indicator light that can be used to determine the battery status or other alarms.
The six rotor design provides redundancy in the event of a motor or propeller failure. The IMU and 400 gram payload area of the Firefly are decoupled from the main frame of the vehicle helping to isolate sensors from vibrations. The Firefly will be available in 2012 starting at 5,695 Euros. A sales brochure can be found here.
The AscTec Mastermind is a new on-board computer custom designed for computationally intensive sUAS research. Available with processors up to Intel Core i7, the system can now handle running significantly more complex tasks than previously possible. The additional performance allows more tasks to be run on-board instead of on a ground station. This frees up communications bandwidth for enhanced teleoperation and make autonomous operation of the aircraft more stable in environments where WiFi is unreliable. The Mastermind supports Firewire, USB and Ethernet and additional functionality can be added via MiniPCI. Storage can be provided via CFast, mSATA, SATA or SDHC devices. Available in 2012 starting at 1,795 Euros.
This video is of some loiter testing I did this morning of my Trex450 running the latest arducopter code, 2.0.50.
If it were a quad I might not be super happy with the results but for a traditional heli, I think this is a pretty good performance. The altitude hold is very solid using Jason Short's latest code paired with a maxbotix MB1260 XL-EZL0 sonar which is mounted on the tail using a custom 3d printed mount.
There's some more work to do to resolve the circling (which is always in the clockwise direction by the way). I guess what's happening is that the heli is always missing it's target - so for example if the loiter point is straight north, it's actually heading slightly north-west. I suspect the problem is either:
- the compass declination is incorrect
- it's caused by the natural interaction of the roll and pitch on the heli. So for example if the autopilot wants the heli to go forward it pitches forward, but pitching forward also causes a slight roll left which we current don't account for in the code.
Also the P and I values need some more tuning to stop any overshoot.
This code is the latest and greatest and can be downloaded from the APMissionPlanner. By the way, if you're not familiar with the arducopter code for the heli, it's 95% the same as the quad code, just some changes here and there to deal with moving servos around instead of motors.
If anyone has any other ideas, comments or advice on the circling or anything else, I'd love to hear them.
This doesn't have anything to do with UAVs, but I did use some of what we learned with ArduPilot in this fun robotic project, which I thought I would share with you all.
My daughter has a history project to do on the Ford Model T and the origins of the production line. Given that she and I had just been to the new Tesla factory, with its fully robot-driven production process, we though we could do a fun "then and now" comparison of car production lines in 1911 and 2011.
First step: create a working model of the Tesla production line robots. We took a cheap OWI remote control robot arm kit and hacked it for Arduino control, with full closed-loop feedback and scriptable paths, just like the real Kuka arms in the Tesla factory.
It was easy and worked great, so I've created an Instructibles tutorial so others can try it for themselves.
Thanks to Martin, we had an awesome Drone Zone meet up in UK at Charter house http://www.charterhouse.org.uk/. It brought together folks from different parts of UK and Eoin flying in from Ireland. The geekiest of us were drawn towards Pete's UAV Dev board running HIL on X-planes.
Other things of geeky interest include Colin's custom build Groundcontrol station among all the quad's, hexa's, Octo's and traditional planes and heli's.
The afternoon went too fast for anyone to notice, with all the drones taking to the air. Again the thing that struck most of us who were there, was the enthusiasm, knowledge and expertise that DIYDrone community created. I hope there would be more of such meet ups and some of the crazy ideas that folks get around to discussed get followed up. So that we could have more new stuff to chat around :).
Successfully maiden'd the Geek Star this week! (Geek Star = MyGeekShow version of the Easy Star) It flew very, very well, better than I anticipated. Its still a little tail heavy due to servos being placed so far in the tail, but that can easily compensated for.
I'm going to use the Easy Star's wings for a while, but will eventually move to a total scratch built airplane.
It flies pretty solid at half throttle and can really climb/cruise at full throttle and after landing, the electronics are very cool.
Motor: http://www.hobbypartz.com/75m42-optima450-2220-950kv.html
ESC: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=13429
Batt: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=6306
Just spotted this teaser on their Twitter stream. Does any anyone have more info on this one?
It was already possible for students and teachers to obtain a free version of Visual Studio 2010 Professional but now this Microsoft offer has been extended to a number of other groups. One group being any individual who is thinking about becoming a web developer.
The extended Microsoft offer provides immediate download and 3 year license for a huge range of products such as Visual Studio 2010 Professional. This appears to open the door to Visual Studio to just about everyone in the arduino community.
To take advantage of the offer you will need to sign up for the free Microsoft WebSiteSpark program. Once you have signed up you will see a big button allowing you sign up for downloads. The big button actually signs you up to the microsoft developer network (msdn).
On msdn you will see a large list of available downloads on your msdn downloads page. Choose a Visual Studio 2010 Professional download from the list and install it. To the right of each "download link" is a link that will show your personal license key for the selected product (keep it private).
http://www.microsoft.com/websitespark/
The addin is already blogged about so I won't go into any detail. The Visual Micro site provides download and information about the addin. The picture below provides an idea of available features.
The addin makes developing arduino faster, easier and more enjoyable. However there is also a massive gallery of other useful tools for Visual Studio. You can view the Visual Studio Gallery here http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/
Hi all again,
Following my first blog post on DIYDrones few people have asked what Pigeon Post is and why I'm posting here.
The Pigeon Post project is developing a system of technologies and standards to drag the snail mail and package delivery industry into the 21st Century. It hopes to meet the following aims:
- Mail packages from the customer not a post box.
- Deliver to a person not a building or post code.
- Delivery time is set specifically or dictated by urgency and distance not First and Second Class.
- Price is flexible depending on demand and supply.
- Uses the existing untapped delivery capacity of public and private vehicles for medium and long distance deliveries.
- Cut the costs of delivering in rural areas where costs are presently the highest.
The strategy we are exploring at the moment is to use Quadcopters and internet protocol style packet switching concepts to move packages from customer to customer.
The project is slow launching this week as I'll be pitching the idea at Manchester Social Media Cafe and to The Next Web next week. I'm looking for feedback at the moment, though not just "The technology isn't ready yet" as I've already answered that one over on the blog. If you have any suggestions or questions about possible problems, solutions to those problems, or nice things to say in general, please comment here or email nathan@nathanrae.co.uk. You can also follow what's happening on twitter as well.
If you would like to join the project I'm looking for people who can volunteer some knowledge, time and expertise on autonomous quadcopters and 3D prototyping. I'm also looking for someone with a couple of spare copters laying around to make concept video showing how the system would/could work once it's up and running. I'm going to bootstrap the project for a while until I have a comprehensive enough proposal and some video or animations before raising funding to accelerate the research stage.
Thanks,
Nathan Rae.
Maybe this has been posted before, but I was unaware of this.
I have been assembling my quadcopter and as advised have used red loctite # 271 to lock the metal nuts and the prop mounts.
I have used it all up and bought some blue loctite #243 and have used it on some of the nylon nuts last night and have just noticed today that it has eaten away the part of the nylon bolt inside the nut and the nylon nuts are soft and easily split in two with my thumb nail.
I must hold my hands up and admit that I didn't realise that threadlock could do this to plastic, but thought I would bring it to everybodys attention.
Martinp
Here is another thing that I did - 9) CLI – message when bad command entered - Add a message so users know when they have entered an invalid command.
So instead of just swallowing wrong commands it will be something like this:
ArduPlane V2.24] blah-blah-blah
Unknown command! Please try again.
Type 'help' to see list of available commands.
Submitting this code at the moment!
UPDATE: Right now I've received mail from Doug saying that my patch has been added to master branch and we'll up for everyone with next firmware release! *YAHOO*
Interesting article about Arduino....
I was bored at the flying field today so I decided to do something useful, attempt to video an electric ducted fan. Damn they are fast.
So it looks like one crucial element in the Pigeon Post set up may have got a little more expensive. The Guardian is reporting that Google will now be charging users who make more than 25000 API calls a day.
The pricing is pretty reasonable and I'm sure the Pigeon Post wont get close to the limit during the delevopment process but when we take off we'll be hitting the API almost constantly.
The solution to this around this would be to:
Simply pass the cost onto the customers.
Find an alternative free mapping service such as the Ordinance Survey in the UK.
Develop a way for the Perches to cache the local data and plot a course from memory.
Something someone more intelligent than me will think off.
We'll have to see...
Nathan Rae
Originally posted at www.pigeonpost.co/blog
The twitter account is now active so please follow thmeproject at www.twitter.com/pigeonpostco
BoardX is a collection of electronic circuit boards from Upgrade Industries that stack on top of one another to share resources, communicate, and extend the functionality of one another. This system is built on the motherboard that acts as both an electrical and structural foundation.
Unlike similar products (but much like a familiar PC system), the motherboard does not come with a processor pre-installed. Processors come as simple, low cost add-on boards, which allow any processor (or multiple processors) to be used with the system. BoardX is also Arduino compatible (with the Arduino SDK. shields, on the other hand will need modification)
Add-ons can be attached to the USB, SPI, UART, and I2C buses to provide any feature imaginable. These can be sensors, communication interfaces, or even physical control devices like motors or servos. With this idea in mind, a robust and flexible design can be achieved that allows you to choose which parts of the system to design and which parts can be off the shelf.
BoardX is available early and at a discount for contributors to the Kickstarter funding pool - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/upgradeindustries/boardx-the-open-source-miniature-motherboard
Using two gyros and a PID controller in custom hardware, this bipedal robot stabilizes itself as it rides around on its bike.
(in Japanese, but Google Translate provides something reasonably understandable.
Above you can see a screenshot of my latest hack: a remote control app for an Android phone controlling my mini quadcopter via bluetooth. What is it controlling? This:
This is my rendition of a small indoor quadcopter, strongly inspired by Jose Julio's work
My frame design pretty much follows Jose's approach, except that I only have one square base plate in the center (it looks rather unfinished on the bottom because of this ;-)), and I did not get the correct size stand-offs to use as motor mounts, so I machined my own out of Delrin plastic.
The electronics are completely home-built, with no direct relation to the Arducopter project (probably not hard to tell from the rats-nest of wires in the picture). The main board is basically a 2x2 inch proto board with a socket for an Atmega328 and a few supporting components (voltage regulator, 20Mhz crystal and a number of pin headers to plug in ESCs and other sensors and power distribution). The IMU sensor is the red stick seen on top of the Atmega328, a 9DOF (Acc, Gyro and Mag) Sparkfun I2C sensor stick. Other sensors present are an MTK GPS receiver from DIYDrones, a BMP085 barometric pressure sensor and (underneath, not visible in the picture) a Mabotix sonar.There is also voltage monitoring of the main battery.
The custom software is an Atmega fork of my other quad project, it currently squeezes the (quaternion-based) IMU code, RC decoder (for regular RC receivers, currently not used, see below), telemetry downlink, on-the-fly adjustable parameters, navigation (currently only position-hold, really) and general control code into ~30K of flash. The inner loop runs at ~350Hz (keep in mind that the Atmega is clocked at 20Mhz, though) and the ESCs are updated at 400Hz.
The most interesting part (to me at this point, anyways) is the small silver component to the bottom left of the GPS receiver: this is a Sparkfun RN-41 class 1 bluetooth module used to communicate with and control the quadcopter. The actual control/remote control software is also home-built and runs as an app on my Android phone:
In the picture above you can see the main flight controls: the two red circles react to touch and basically mimic the functionality of the two sticks of a mode-2 remote control. There is an alternative 'accelerometer' or tilt-mode in which the user only controls the left, throttle and yaw stick while the right stick (pitch and roll) is controlled by tilting the phone (I suppose this is similar to the way a Parrot drone is controlled). In the very first picture, you can also see that the app displays a (admittedly very crude) 3D wire-frame model of the copter that moves like the actual copter (via downlink telemetry data). GPS coordinates, altitude and battery voltage are also displayed (probably not in the most ergonomic manner at this point). When the controls are touched, the 3D model fades into the background, which is why it harder to see on the second picture.
It is also possible to adjust various parameters stored in EEPROM on the quadcopter within the app:
How does it fly with these controls? It is actually quite flyable, but the restoring-force of the springs on a proper remote control are definitely missing, making it hard not to over-correct. I implemented a pretty shallow throttle curve in the hover-region of throttle-output which helps quite a bit. In general, it seems easier to fly in 'tilt-mode' than when controlling pitch and roll via the touch-interface.
The way I use the bluetooth connection is basically as a serial connection over which I sent a custom (almost human-readable, not MAV-link, though) protocol. It is therefore almost trivial to hook up a simulator remote (or joystick) to a bluetooth-enabled laptop and use a few lines of Perl (or any other language of choice) to control the quad via that.
Another consideration with bluetooth is range, of course. The module on the quadcopter itself is a class 1 device, which supposedly gives it ~330feet range - but I am not sure about the module on the cell-phone side. One could use a pair of longer-range XBees (plus the laptop-remote/joystick solution) to get an increased range. I have not yet investigated whether the XBee might present latency issues (I did configure the quad-side bluetooth module to work in a low-latency mode).
Anyways, it is mostly a proof-of-concept at this stage, but I figured people might find an alternative control concept interesting...
Marko
By far the coolest phone / tablet app I've come across. EveryCircuit is a simple SPICE circuit design tool with a slick touch interface, shows voltage and current animations and more. This is no doubt the look and feel of circuit design tools for the future. Also could be a fun, easy way to learn or teach circuit technology.
From Android Market
"Features: + Animations of voltage waveforms and current flows+ Analog control knob adjusts circuit parameters+ Automatic wire routing+ Seamless DC and transient simulation+ Single play/pause button controls simulation+ Saving and loading of circuit schematic+ Mobile simulation engine built from ground-up+ Intuitive user interface+ No AdsComponents:+ Sources, signal generators+ Resistors, capacitors, inductors+ Diodes, Zener diodes, light emitting diodes (LED)+ MOS transistors (MOSFET)+ Bipolar junction transistors (BJT)+ Ideal operational amplifier (opamp)+ Digital logic gates, AND, OR, NOT, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR. Coming Soon: + Oscilloscope+ More components"
