Blogs

Some of you may wonder.

Why was there such so long silence ?

Indeed, my last entry dates back to last christmas. And here is the reason why:

http://www.apress.com/9781430231837

 
I was asked by JD Warren, who is also a diydrones member ( http://diydrones.com/profile/JDWarren ) to help him on a book about Arduino-controlled robots.

JD is a great inventor and maker of various machines that (mostly) roll on wheels. He was also featured on the title of the MAKE magazine in April 2010. 
Finally, with a delay of six months, the book was published by mid July and JD, Josh and i are happy now that all the work is over. 
If you want things to be moved with Arduino, this is the ultimate Book.

There are lots of hands-on descriptions in it and it is also a good starting point for newbies, that have never had a soldering iron in their hand.It gives also a good introduction to the basics of electronics and computerized control.

Here is an overview of some of the chapters:

• Basics of motor-control
• Basics of PCB design and fabrication
• R/C control and decoding
• Autonomous sensor guidance
• Frame building from various materials
• Instructions for a variety of robot designs, including: 

• Linus the Line Bot, who follows a line on the floor  
• Wally the Wall-Bot, who tries to avoid crashing to the wall  
• The Bug-Bot, who acts a little bit like an insect  
• The Explorer-Bot, who is strong enough to carry a human and that can work outdoors  
• The RoboBoat, which is navigating via GPS to predefined waypoints.    (this is in fact the chapter written by me and summarizes the building of the catamaran, and the modified ArduPilot hardware that i am using to do the survey of lakes)  
• The Lawn-Bot 400,  who is the first that can do something useful in your garden  
• The Seg-Bot, which is in truth not a robot, but a Segway (tm) Clone  
• And finally: the Battle-Bot

The book is available as e-book or in a printed version:
 http://www.apress.com/9781430231837 or 

http://www.amazon.com/Arduino-Robotics-John-David-Warren/dp/1430231831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314021806&sr=8-1

  

This week the Robotics Association at Embry-Riddle attended the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) North America conference in Washington D.C. We had 14 students and 6 faculty at the event.

At the conference we met Jordi Munoz, Gigio Romero and Geoffrey Barrows. They all came by our booth at the conference and we all talked for a while about DIYDrones and the Ardupilot. We are excited to continue using the Ardupilot on our Easystar aircraft which we had on display at the conference.

The conference was a big success for our students. We were able to network with many major companies, and we will probably get significant donations for our projects. The Stratasys booth had one of our Monocopters on display that they printed on their Fortus500 FDM printer. 

We were also able to fly a couple of our vehicles in the demonstration area. We flew our monocopter and our quadrotor at the same time in the netted arena. To everyone's surprise, they didn't hit each other! 

Our students had a great time at the worlds largest unmanned systems conference and we are looking forward to next year's conference in Las Vegas, NV! 

Sometimes APM development goes fast, and sometimes it goes like molasses in winter. After being asked repeatedly (over many months - sorry) I have finally gotten support for multiple aileron channels in place. You can use this if you want to set your airframe up with differential ailerons or if you have separate servos on your ailerons and they don't move opposite directions for a given input.

The big delay with this change was coordinating the way we would use channels 5-8 for a variety of purposes.  Functionality is coming for flaps, camera mounts and more.

Here are the things to know about using the new dual aileron functionality:

1. I have tested this on the bench, but have not flight tested it.  I do not expect any problem, but as always with new functionality exercise some caution.
2. The functionality is in the current version of the code in the repo (trunk).
3. You can set up the second aileron on either channel 5 or 6.  Remember that it does not matter which channel it is on your receiver.  Just take that receiver output and hook it up to 5 or 6.
4. For that channel (5 or 6) you will need to set a new parameter.  For channel 5 it is rc_5_funct.  You can set this as a parameter through a GCS like APM Planner, or you can set it using a #define in your config file.  If you set it in your config file use #define RC_5_FUNCT RC_5_FUNCT_AILERON.  If you set it through the GCS set rc_5_funct to a value of 1.
5. If you want to use differential aileron travel program your radio so that it works as you desire in manual mode.
6. You will need to redo your radio calibration.   I do not know if APM Planner properly supports calibration of channels 5 and 6, but I will drop Mike O an email about it and I'm sure if it does not now, it will very soon.  The CLI procedure does work fine.
7. You cannot set the reversing for the 2nd aileron channel with the dip switches (as there is not one available for this).  So, it is highly recommended that you disable the dip switches and set up your reversing using the parameters.  Remember that if you are working with the raw parameter values reversing is 1 or -1.

Been out testing today with my Razor600e.

Wind was Blowing around 8-10mph on the ground, you can hear it on the video.

Testing altitude hold.

I'm still having trouble with the tail control but i think i have the Altitude Hold is sorted out now.

Running Code Version 2.0.38

Had a few small problems with the P value. Oscillations were pretty bad before I lowered it. 

Touched the ground a couple of times.

Had a few small issues when i changed to Loiter mode but i need to talk to randy.

It seems to be holding certain values when i switched out. Tried after i made the video to do some more Alt_hold

and it kept going up until it hit the same level as it was when i had it in loiter.

But i think i'm getting there.

Will post the Log file in my discussion.

Maybe someone knows, that this week (August 16-21) in Moscow has been MAKS-2011. This is International Aviation and Space Exhibition which is held every two years and is one of the most important aviation events in Russia.
There have been a lot of different exhibits from tiny aircraft parts to even Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner! And, certainly, ArduPilot Mega is not an exception.
I presented my amateur UAV (actually, this is RC plane with APM) as a part of our University exposition (I am a third-year student at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology).
I did HIL simulation in X-Plane to show all the possibilities of the system. A lot of visitors were interested in APM and really liked it after flying in different modes and watching how good AUTO mode works. Some of them are even going to purchase APM. Moreover, it was nice to see many foreigners, mainly from Europe and Asia (there were a few from the US) interested in APM too.
During the first days of exhibition (business days, only for specialists), visitors mostly interested in technical and commercial aspects of the system and during the last days (when it was opened for all people) children were happy to fly in Manual or Stabilize modes using transmitter. I was pleased to show my plane setup and tell people about APM.
Here are some photos of the event:

Our University's exposition

APM is working

In the end of exhibition our University got this diploma of a party

Later I will make yet another one blog post about the other UAV projects presented at the exhibition.

For my next airplane I'm planning on using a folding prop to reduce damage during landings (as my motor is mounted on the nose). The folding prop looked smaller (the actual blade-moving air portion) and I was also a little concerned about the folding blades becoming unbalanced or not fully extending.

I decided to throw three different kinds of props on my motor testing tower and find out what their performance really was. I tested them for amps consumed, watts required, airspeed (at about 1 ft. away from the prop) and of course, thrust.

The folding prop did just fine, and at least matched the performance of the others. I have no hesitation of using on my MTP3.

Final details:

Blades: http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXZL07&P=7

Hub: http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXZL06&P=M

Not this exact prop, but very much like it: http://www.hobby-lobby.com/8x5_prop_359_prd1.htm?pSearchQueryId=1749700

Prop from HK: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__5437__APC_style_propeller_8x4_E.html

I know this isn't news, but please indulge me a moment of pride in the APM dev teams. They have built the world's first "universal autopilot". The same hardware can fly all of the above--every kind of airplane, multicopter and helicopter, along with hardware-in-the-loop simulations--with one click to load new firmware in the Mission Planner. That's just amazing.

And if you want it to autonomously control a rover or boat, that's just a few more clicks. 

As far as I know, this has never been done before. Congrats to the whole APM dev team!

(And they're just getting started. You'll be blown away by what's coming...)

The latest version of the Mission Planner (1.0.55) has a nice little feature that you might not notice, so I thought I'd call it out. In the Configuration tab, where all the user-modifiable MAVLink parameters are, "tool tips" that explain what each does now appear when you hover over each parameter. Very handy for figuring out what does what and how to modify them.

The full list of MAVLink parameters is in the manual here, but now you don't need to look them up. It's right there in the Mission Planner. Another great update by Michael Oborne!

I visit regularly this site since January, 2011, and I was attracted by the quality of the exchanges, the blogs, Wiki, explanations etc. …

Before choosing for a platform, I visited about ten of the other community,

sometimes, more technical, or more playful, more...etc

But !

   nobody is also clear, effective and positive in the communication as DIYDrones,

     Congratulation Chris !

Thanks to your enthusiasm, I have decided to invest in Ardu Pilot Mega, for a new Quadri-copter which I prepare.

Especially, keep this quality level in the communication between the people !

Excuse my poor english, i am french boy !

Today's Meet the Developers is Sandro Benigno, who displays the amazing range of talent we have here. I first realized the scope of his abilities when he took the APM design files and, on his own, created the photorealistic renders of them that we still use in the manual:

Since then Sandro had designed and rendered countless other images and diagrams for the manual and other pages. Now he's working, with Max Levine and Samantha Nelson, on an overall rebranding of the product pages. Plus he's part of the team leading the camera control features that will be in the next version of APM, which means he's coding, too! 

He's a warm and genuinely nice person, and it's always a pleasure to work with him. And he stays up to 2:00 am Brazil time for our Sunday night Dev Calls. See what I mean about him? Amazing--we're luck to have him on the dev team.

Over to Sandro:

Name: Sandro de Freitas Benigno

In this HakTip from DEFCON 19 Darren is joined by Piotr of the QuadShot project.
Project site: http://thequadshot.com/

Hi guys. Here's a little experiment we did yesterday using Doug Weibel's spektrum-to-PPM substitute firmware for the APM's ATmega328P, an upcoming (now available here!) Spektrum Adapter accessory board, and an ArduCopter. Sorry about the lack of video, but I can assure you our resident quad pilot Jeff Taylor flew this here at the shop with good results (considering none of this is fully baked)!

The Spektrum Adapter accessory powers the Spektrum module with an on-board 3.3V regulator, takes care of level translation on the single serial line, and has an input pin to enable/disable the regulator (this is used for putting the satellite in bind mode). The four pins are GND, 5V, data, and regulator enable.

I wrote a (very) crude sketch to put the satellite in different bind modes, you can grab it here: https://gist.github.com/ef01907a5c90dd66f987. I've tested it with DSM2, DSMX, and Orange Rx satellites. I've found that "DSM2 1024/22ms" mode is the one that works with Doug's firmware. The sketch is meant to be used on any Arduino Mega style board, it uses Tx1 to enable the regulator and consequently the satellite at the right moment to then receive the bind mode pulses sent out through Rx1. Once the sat is in bind mode, Rx1 is configured as an input again to receive the serial data after binding.

The ATmega328P needs to be re-programmed with Doug's firmware. You can either Arduino-ify the chip with the right bootloader and load the sketch through an FTDI cable connected to IN1 and IN2, or take the easy way and verify the sketch, grab the .hex file, and load it with an AVR ISP programmer.

Once the sat is bound, I soldered the adapter board on to an APM as seen in the photo, directly on the three IN1 pins. IN1 is the 328's Rx and is the only pin needed to receive the satellite's channel data. The small blue wire in the photo is connecting the 5V and reg enable pins to keep the regulator on at all times. The 328's Tx line could also be set high at all times to do the same thing, maybe the binding modes can be integrated into the 328 firmware as well?

After this, all should be the same as when using the full Rx module with servo extension cables. We found no problems with this setup during the Mission Planner configuration steps.

The Spektrum Adapter boards are now in stock in the store! Feedback for future revisions is welcome, and happy hacking!

As with any inventor, designer or engineer, things don't always go my way!

Actually as it turns out, I did not damage the Seraphim prototype, but did destroy the reciever! That cheered me up a bit as we have much more need for the Seraphim rather than the reciever at the moment, I have spare of the latter.

Nonetheless, the lesson still stands...check all the wiring, check it again, and check it once more. The problem is that bad wiring doesn't always do damage, so I tend to rush soldering jobs, if you cut a bit of wood short, there are no two ways about it....it definately won't bridge the gap!

I've been running loads of new tests recently, which I'll gradually find time to talk about! Check here on DIY drones for more detail and other information I don't have the time to post more than once on our website: www.universalair.co.uk

I have just recently created a crash test video and written about why I chose aluminium for the ROFL frame, you can read this at: www.universalair.co.uk/content/durability-aluminium-crash-testing-rofl

Comments and ideas appreciated as always :)

Having an interest in robots that mimic living creatures I found this vid amusing. Imagine 100 of these APMed and schooling around a football stadium!

localhawk

At aprox 200Euros including special flybareles head seems ok to me.....

Here's a cool project to open source the telemetry data stream that the Aurora 9 RC gear uses:

 

Among others, one thing that makes the 2.4GHz Aurora 9 so great is the big LCD in combination with the full telemetry features of the Optima 7/9 receivers. These receivers contain a so-called data port that connects to Hitec’s sensor station. Sensor stations come in 2 flavors: a nitro version for gas and glow powered planes and a blue version for electric powered aircrafts.

  

But … Hitec’s sensor stations are not so versatile as they should be, therefore I developed one by myself. It works so great that I decided to share my design and introduce a DIY kit. Also great is that all software and hardware is open source. Build one by yourself or buy a DIY kit containing all necessary components and a professionally manufactured circuit board.

Via Hackaday

Today's Meet the Developers profile is Jani Hirvinen, who is one of the leaders of the ArduCopter project. Jani is one of our core team members, is always on the Sunday night dev call and is constantly testing new code, suggesting improvments and extending the platform to new airframes and configurations. He's got boundless energy and seems to always be working!

One of his most impressive contributions was the hardware design for the official ArduCopter frames, motors and whole concept including firmwares, which he did almost single-handedly and really accelerated the project. Jani's one of the DIY Drones entrepreneurial sucess stories, too. He got so into the project that he made it his job, and now runs jDrones, which is both a manufacturing operation and retail store, full time out of Bangkok.

Name:Jani Hirvinen

Nationality: Finnish

Home: Bangkok, Thailand

Dev role: ArduCopter hardware leader, bug hunter and extreme tester.

Day job: Running jDrones, ArduCopter & UAV parts development and production in multiple countries. HQ as in Bangkok

Background: After working a long time with AeroQuad and many other multicopters, the move to ArduCopter project was convenient. When DIY Drones wanted to move towards multirotors and ArduCopter was born, I joined to ArduCopter dev team as one of it's original members and we created well known ArduCopter frames and kits as they are known these days. 

First we created basic ArduCopter software as a merge from AeroQuad and Joses codebases. We quickly saw that it was not that path that we want to go so me and Jose created new architecture for ArduCopter and ArduCopterNG was born. ArduCopterNG was big step towards ArduPilot Mega code bases

Nowdays all my time goes on parts development, management issues, dealing out with all our suppliers, looking new and better parts to help you all our users out there, testing and crashing a lot on our products so our users not need to crash them :)

Personal History: Born in Helsinki, Finland 1969 to aviation full family as dad used to be Captain on Finnair and flight instructor, Naturally Mom had her flight licenses and flew often if had time from her car racing career. Started electronics on age of 4 and got my first computer on age of 6. Hobby airplanes came along age of 8. Having degrees on Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science. Last 20 years been running Global Internet service providers,  IT Training & Consult projects and working on high tech technology transfers between Finland and Thailand. Now living full time in land of smiles and working like crazy on jDrones and DIYDrones related projects. 

Motto: There are no stupid questions... Learn something new every day, if not it's a boring day. (not fan of boring days)

Other hobbies: R/C Heli flying, Electronics, Occasional Paragliding, Sailplane flying, Ice Skating (yes in Bangkok... hey i'm from Finland). Among many other things if there are any free time left, which has not been the case lately.

The new Pro Tricopter Delrin Kit from fpvmanuals. Motor mounting options: Up or Down. Super precise, slop free Yaw mechanism with ball bearings and airplane grade aluminum axle. Foldable boom design. All laser cut parts including Delrin frame and motor mounts, Bamboo camera mount, and acrylic feet and flight controller cover.  Over 142 pieces of hardware included in the kit. All up weight, fully built, only 630g (without battery). Kit does not come with booms/arms: your choice on material and length to suite your needs. Learn more about the kit at:

http://www.fpvmanuals.com/tricopter

Kit available late August / early September for $89.99

(put yourself on the pre-order list to get it for $75 when it becomes available)

Today's Developer is Olivier Adler, who works with John Arne Birkeland on the PPM encoder team. I already described the PPM encoder project in detail here, so I'll just turn this over to Olivier!


Name: Olivier Adler
Home: The city of Troyes, in North-East France, about 150 Km from Paris. We are in the region of Champagne. Here's a famous house in Troyes:



Day Job : Technical director in my company ( FRANCE IP ) where I manage the telephony platform and client servicing.

Project activity : New ppm encoder programming (ArduCoder) with John Arne, hardware testing / design adviser.

Background : Audio recording engineer, servicing specialist. CNC machines design and Mach3 project helper. Expert RC 1/8 car pilot (30 years ago).

Interests: Electronic design / service - mechanic design and machining - radio links - optical fiber links - computing - photography - RC models

Fun things : My old experience with RC car competitions gave me the bad habits of extensively testing models before to drive or to fly. It's like this after discovering a small glitch inside the ppm encoder that i entered the Arducopter team as a programmer helper and hardware tester for the new ArduCoder ppm encoder. Always interested by technical stuff, I began RC modeling when i was about 10 years old, 31 years ago. I tried boats, planes, helicopters, cars, buggy..

At about 15 years old, I was expert 1/8 RC car pilot, sometimes racing in the France Championship, but not too long because of the weight of studies. After sound engineer studies in Belgium, I became technical director in a couple of well known French recording studio facilities. As I was more comfortable creating things, rather than servicing big mixing desks and tape recording machines I started the design and manufacturing of CNC interfaces for 3 to 6 axis millers based on the open source MACH3 project.

I helped on this project for general testing and submitted the idea to use Modbus protocol who is now widely used for interfacing PLCs or modbus devices like tools changer with Mach3. Then I founded FRANCE IP, a local telephony provider. After 31 years without any RC activity, I found Multicopters very interesting, and decided to start this hobby. I started watching at the Mikrokopter commercial project then i did find the Arducopter 2 project, and decided i would start with it because of full opening freedom and very promising future.