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After 6 months of watching the rest of you, I finally had a free weekend to begin the build of my own ArduCopter. I really was inspired by Markus's H-design of his eight engine quad copter.

When I checked the store, they only had four of the 2836's but after I ordered 30 more showed up instantly so I purchased 6 more for a total of 10. (in case the first flight went south). I was hoping the 6 would show Saturday morning but they didn't. So, the above picture is testing throttle with the 4 in an X flight mode. This didn't work too as the apm is at 0 degrees and the motors are off alignment. I plan to change it to + flight mode and just double up on the motors and escs like Markus did. I have GWS 3 blade 9030 props and a 6000 3s battery. At 1/3 throttle, it really lifted off quite well and I had difficulty holding it down at full throttle. I don't know the  weight of it right now but it's pretty light. I can only wonder how much it'll lift after the  other 4 motors are installed.

Using the H design gives plenty of space to mount esc's and run wire, plus it keeps the  central area clean for the brains. I had two 8' lengths of aluminum moulding that held garage door water barriers. I cut them into 12" pieces and used them for the central beam and some foam tape to lessen the vibrations of the copter.

I can't find any square aluminum in town but we have tons of the U stuff at the local big box store. I just found thinner sized and "doubled up" to make the motor mounts. I was really hesitant on the U aluminum as it's a little less rigid but it seems to work just fine.

The 25amp Turnigy "Basic" ESC's I ordered didn't come with 3.5mm barrel ends so I had to solder 3 for each ESC *10 esc's I ordered. I discovered an easy way to do this quickly, not sure if the rest of you have done this but it worked very well.

Just drill 3 holes, put in your barrel plugs (will also work with the male ends), heat, dump in some solder and hold the wire in till it hardens.. piece of cake. I did 10 esc's in about 15 min..

Here is my power distribution, I made one for the left and one for the right, they'll connect together of course and be fed from the 6000 miliamp nano tech battery.

That's it for now. I plan to have it carry my go pro for  aerial photography. Perhaps my DSLR in the future after I know this is rock solid.. It's looks promising.

More to come.

Hi,
in this test I check a new software management of coaxial propellers.
It seems that everything works well, no micro-oscillation
Danilo

My entry for the T3 contest, ending this weekend.

T3_Trappy.kmz

I started a forum to keep some of my tangential discussions from taking up the space here.

Topics:

FAA regulations - current and in process

AMA

Recreational autonomous systems

Recreational FPV systems

No censorship other than for abuse and profanity.

Free registration to post, only valid email required to register.

After some months of development this is the first flight of ArduPilot32 platform.

Hardware :

• Ardupilot32 pre alpha hw.
• IMU Oilpan.
• Low Cost (6$) standard PWM ESC.
• PPM_SUM receiver.
• Lipo 2200 3S
• Propeller 10

For this flight I using Arducopter 32 NG firmware. This is my porting of original code to Arm 7 Cortex A3 platform. With this micro will be available more power , more flash and ram resources

This space and performances its very good for improve performance of our Drone. The Era of our ARM Drone's Started.

original thread : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/forum/topics/multipilot-20-ap32-building

Regards

Roberto

When we started to make DIY Drones ArduCopter frames and parts we could not foresee the surprisingly strong market demand that existed for this product and the very positive response of the DIY community.  Almost from the beginning, we have had a difficult time keeping up with the ever-larger orders and responding to the many requests for parts, technical information, etc.

We are pleased to announce that we are now taking steps to improve the situation.

We were originally operating within the structure of an existing Thai company, Fah Pah Electronics. This allowed us to “hit the ground running” and worked well enough for a while.  Now, however, it is clear that DIY Drones ArduCopter project has outgrown its relationship with Fah Pah and will be doing business on its own.

Specifically, we have established a new company in Thailand, jDrones, which will be working solely on DIY Drones and UAV-related technologies and products.

We are confident that this structural change will enable us to work more effectively and efficiently and give our customers even greater quality and higher service levels. 

The establishment of jDrones is being “fast-tracked” and so should be ready for business in the next 5 days. We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause you and kindly ask for your patience.  In the end, we know that jDrones will be able to bring you affordable, reliable drones and UAV's based on the very latest technology.

Looking forward to working with you soon.
-Jani
 

Seen this in one of the latest R/C mags...
Claims to have flight modes to aid R/C beginners...

Fly by wire, Loiter, Autonomous Landing, Panic Mode
Doesn't appear to be open source..seems to have some familiar components though,

Pictures and Article:
http://www.modelairplanenews.com/ME2/dirmod.asp?sid=17F3E50B054A4C1C9FDD81B36E52B522&nm=Site+Features&type=news&mod=News&mid=9A02E3B96F2A415ABC72CB5F516B4C10&tier=3&nid=C377848E9D574EC0BBA1A218ED172E51

Product Catalog:
http://www.uthere.com/products/products_index.html

Inspired by John Arne's post, I got a Redcat Rockslide, which is totally cool and a great robotics platform. As you can see, it's really easy to add a mounting platform for electronics (that's APM with GPS and Xbee mounted above) and there's LOADS of room. You could even have it carry a laptop if you wanted. BTW, that's the 1/8 size Redcat shown above, which is $236. I think the 1/10 size Redcat would probably be just as good for most uses, and it's just $159. [Update: the 1:10 isn't big enough. See this comparison]

I've registered the ArduRover name, and am now just looking for the best starting point to modify the APM code for ground rovers. Since James Goppert is part of the APM dev team, we'll probably start with his rover code, which you can see at work here. But if others have code or sensor additions to the basic APM set that would be good to add to a rover, this is the place to discuss and share.

Ideally, we'll get this done in time for the Sparkfun AVC contest, on the hope that APM can have a decent chance of placing in all of the categories--ground, plane and quad. Which would be awesome.

A Brigham Young student team is working on their second solar-powered UAV. The first one, shown here, didn't have enough power to climb, but now they have better solar cells.

Here are the detail:

"Power system:
Mega 16/7/17 motor
MPJ 3.8:1 Gearbox
18x13 folding prop

Airframe:
Fuselage-Magellan E-XL
span-3m or 2m
airfoil-SD8000 

So we are just researching and trying to make a plane that will work. We currently have two wings being built.The high aspect ratio wing is the 3m which has a cord just big enough for the solar cell array. The low aspect ratio wing will have a chord length to fit two solar cells wide and span will be closer to 2m. 

Solar array:
24 A-300 cells
~3W per cell"

Reduced Yaw Drift / Fast Gyro Sampling with the UDB / MatrixPilot from Pete Hollands .

[Note: Apologies for the low sound volume in this video. Please turn your volume up.]

This is a demonstration of the reduced Yaw Drift which is possible when sampling the gyros at 30,000 times / second (Thanks to William Premerlani for this R&D and code).  Using QGroundControl and the MatrixPilot MAvlink implementation, I show a real time graph of the resulting negligble yaw drift in the UDB IMU.

In the demo I do refer to the accelerometers quite a bit. I should really have been focussing on the gyros. It is the high sampling of the gyros, and the integration of the resulting data which leads to the low yaw drift. So please ignore my comments about the accelerometers.

Demonstration uses Revision 790 of MatrixPilot_mavlink branch at this address
code.google.com/​p/​gentlenav/​

Hey All, with the outback challenge preparations for 2011 about to heat up, the upcoming Australian air show ( http://www.airshow.net.au ) might provide us a great opportunity to meet up for some pizza/hot-dogs and a catch up.

If anyone’s interested we’ll organise a time and place, hopefully sometime during the week of the air show (1st – 6th march), whether it’s inside the grounds or just at a local restaurant.

Post a reply if your keen and we’ll see what happens.

(Also posted at RCGroups)

Matt
uavdev

In a year that marks the centenary of the professional firefighter in Victoria, CyberQuad sets the standard for innovation in firefighting.

MFB believes CyberQuad has huge potential for delivering information from difficult incidents where an aerial perspective would greatly help manage and coordinate the emergency effort. Two of the flying eye-in-the-sky fan-driven aircraft have been purchased; one equipped with a high definition camera, the other with a standard definition camera as well as a thermal imaging camera.

Full story http://www.suasnews.com/2011/01/3597/melbourne-firefighters-deploy-quadrocopter/

Back in 1979, there was Newton... the land drone and faithful companion!  Invented by Steve Hodges, a serial entrepeneur here in Boise, Idaho (where I live).  Steve just recently sold M2M, an irrigation communications company for $33.3 Mil.

Now all we need to do is get him interested in flying robots!

Check out the youtube video of Newton from 1979... it's super cheesy yet admittedly ahead of its time!

I have been working on an improved altitude estimator for a while here but have been having issues with implementation.

The theory works fine but as seen above in the FFT of the accelerometer data, there is a significant ammount of vibration/noise in the sub 50Hz range.  This is due to out of balance props etc.  Needless to say, this proves to be very detrimental to estimating altitude and velocity changes when these vibrations are an order of magnitude greater than the actual accelerations felt by climbing and descending.  You cant really low pass filter or band pass filter this because you need everything below 60 Hz or so. 

So here is what I need from you guys:

Flight data that includes the following:

• dt in ms between samples
• phi,theta,psi
• barometric altitude
• sonar altitude (if available)
• ax,ay,az

make sure you notate units etc.  The more information on the data the better.  Thanks for the help and I will post the results.  I'm really hoping to get some data from guys with slick clean vibe free quads. 

Thanks

Beall

A bunch of groups (including us) are working on open source I2C ESCs, which will be cheaper, better and easier to integrate into quadcopters than commercial ESCs. Here's one such project.

This guy is also working on "cloning a Chinese clone" of the MikroKopter quad controller. He reports:

"Everything works as planned.

Features over the ChinaFC-1.35:

* 4 layer PCB with proper ground / power plane
* Pan/Tilt/??? servo output like on OEM MK 2.x
* 3V reg for Spektrum-satellite receiver
* Switching DC/DC regulators instead of 7805
* MK-compatible molex connector for distribution board for I2C/Power/Buzzer
* $68 BOM cost"

 Here are some links for newbies, 

myself still a newbie i found these extremely beneficial,

for basic info on

HARDWARE
 Actuators
 Batteries
 Electronics
 Materials
 Microcontrollers
 Sensors

good to know there is a society of robots...

More from the Berkeley team we wrote about earlier, now with better documentation. From I Heart Robotics: "Patrick Bouffard from the Hybrid Systems Lab at UC Berkeley has done a great job documenting the ROS 3D Contest entry shown below. So it should be easy to reproduce the results if you are lucky enough to have access to a Kinect and an AscTec Pelican quadrotor."

They also note that Ascending Technologies is offering a 15,000 Euro sponsorship for a team doing UAV research. Proposals due by February 13th.

And I can't help but notice that there's a bit of Berkeley robotics cluster forming. Along with all the UC Berkeley research, there's DIY Drones, Berkeley Bionics (exoskeleton makers), 510 Systems (who made Google's robotic streetview cars) and the work at theLawrence Berkeley National Lab.