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We(Flytron.com) were thinking about turning our projects to opensource for a long time. But we were not sure about the way and procedures.

Then, this weekend I read and inspired Chris Anderson's great 10 Rules of Maker Businesses article. His all of the rules %100 right about our business. We find same rules after 2 years work except Opensource side of this job.

After this great article, we (me and Bora) decided to opensource development of our all projects. This is very hard for us because we have 20+ different products. Writing the manuals and explaining the codes will take long time but we will.

At first, we will share the design and codes of our RXBee (Xbee based radio tx/rx for robotic servo controls). Then the OpenFARC (Opensoruce far aerial control) project will follow them. I hope you will like it.

Thanks Chris :)

If you want to see how we cook the delicious electronics, please visit our blog. We will post everything there on every day.

Thanks for reading

Melih

I got my start with drones by using Lego's Mindstorms robotics platform to fly a plane, creating a Lego UAV (which now hangs in the Lego Museum at the Lego HQ in Billund, Denmark). Back in those days, the only way to connect a GPS was to use a unit with Bluetooth and connect it wirelessly to Mindstorms, which was always a bit of a hassle.

Now there's a new module that allows you to connect a GPS sensor like any other Mindstorms sensor, via a cable. Created by Dexter Industries, it can be programmed in NXT-G, RobotC (my favorite) and Lejos. It costs $105. I've had a beta for a while, and it's a very nicely made bit of gear. I may not put Lego back in the air again, but this is going to be great for ground rovers.

Here's a video of a Mindstorms rover navigating with the GPS module and a compass sensor:

It's teardown day at DIY Drones ;-) Sparkfun has a great one on the Neato Robotics robotics vacuum cleaner, which has a cool Lidar unit. From the post:

"Inside you can see the laser and the CMOS imager that the Lidar uses to detect distance to objects. The white paper on this device insists that it can be built for less than $30, but right now the laser can only be bought if it's inside the robot. Still $400 dollars is a low price for a device that does 1-degree accuracy planar scanning at 10Hz. There are four wires running to the laser assembly. Upon closer inspection, we see that these wires are soldered to pads on the board labeled "TX", "RX", "GND", and "VCC". So it's not exactly tough to figure out what communication protocol the device uses."

So far the Sparkfun team have gotten some basic info (see below) out of the device, but it's not fully hacked yet. But given that Robotox has offered a $800 prize for doing that, it's just a matter of time!

People are starting to look seriously at the iPhone 4 as a robotics controller. It's got a full IMU and otherwise looks appealing. You can get all the hardware chip and sensor specs from this excellent iFixIt teardown, but here's just one example: the GPS chip.

It's a Broadcom chip and the refresh rate is "up to 2Hz". The user-accessible data is provided by the OS so the refresh rate in practice may vary, but the hardware looks pretty promising.

This could be a good one. Coming to HobbyKing in a few weeks, and sure to be inexpensive. I can only hope the ridiculously chubby looks means lots of interior room!

The QGroundControl dev team is currently hard working on the integration of more autopilots and the 3D outdoor view. In line with these efforts we would like to add more CAD models of airplanes, helicopters and other MAVs to allow users to select a CAD model close to their aircraft.

If you have a CAD file (.step/.stp or .iges or any other common exchange format), please send it to <pixhawk@switched.com>. Please note that the CAD model will be included into the GLP-licensed QGroundControl application. If you send it in, please do not forget to give the name of the model and the real/physical size.

The new ArduPilotMega Mavlink branch with the latest QGroundControl development branch enables the operator to dynamically load waypoints and set gains in flight. To test out the communication we setup a small ground based experiment with an RC Car. No gains were changed from the default ArduPilotMega gains. Also the inertial navigation code was used between GPS updates but the GPS reset the position/ velocity when each GPS packet was received. This led to some oscillations that will be corrected in later tests. The autopilot trim throttle/ steering is set at the beginning of the experiment using the autotrim feature of the ArduPilotMega autopilot system. At the end of the experiment the trim throttle was insufficient off-pavement and led to the end of the test. More experiments to come! We will be testing out the data-logging and in flight gain adjustment.

Below we have included a screenshot of the ground trajectory. We were using a ublox gps. Note that there was significant GPS signal degradation due to the surrounding buildings that led to the trajectory deviations from the flight plan.

• Maintain compatibility with the config tool. - don't mess too much with the EEPROM.
• Move from our old GPS parsers to the newer and well maintained Libraries.
• Add printf and <avr/pgmspace.h> to move Serial.print strings to ROM from RAM.
• If possible add in CLI from Mega. (We're running low on ROM!)
• Do anything to reduce, clean up code to free up ROM.
• Anything else we can do to align, where possible, with Mega.

This isn't quite DIY, since the Skybotix coax platform costs $5,000 (!), but if you want to run Willow Garage's cool Robot Operating System (ROS), you're going to need some serious computational horsepower, such as an onboard Gumstix linux processor board.

We wrote about this before, but I Heart Robotics has an update:

"There seems to be something about Zurich and Micro Air Vechicles, maybe it's the alpine air. This video shows the Skybotix CoaX helicopter being tele-operated through ROS. On the software side of things the CoaX, appears to be running eRos, or something similar, on-board aGumstix processor. It has basic support for running opencv on-board and is capable of transmitting images as a ROS topic. It's not clear how the IMU and optical flow data is made available in ROS, but overall their documentation looks good.

On the hardware side, the CoaX is equipped with both a pressure altimeter, for outdoor use, and a sonar altimeter, for indoor flight. It has two dsPIC microcontrollers, IMU and a Bluetooth or Zigbee radio. Optionally it can be purchased with a Gumstix Overo, WiFi and lateral IR sensors. The 340mm rotor diameter makes it capable of flight through small apertures and it's low center of gravity makes it aerodynamically stable."

• APM boards will be back in stock at Sparkfun on Monday
• More magnetometer boards will be in stock at the DIY Drones store early next week.
• ArduCopter kits started shipping on Friday, and the first 50 are already out the door. If you pre-ordered one, it will probably be shipped in the next few days.
• We've got tons of new products coming! You're going to be amazed ;-)

On Nov 18th at 11:30 AM a member asked the following on the AMA forum:

"If the NPRM happens in June 2011, what happened recently that made AMA say we have to do stuff 'now'? Cause 'now' aint June2011. "

On that same day by 4:00 PM his post was deleted. Why is the AMA afraid to answer a simple question to an issue they themselves raised? Why did they feel the need to delete his question. He had posted several times and his questions as well several other questions by several other members were deleted. This happens all the time over there but I actually documented this one with timed web snapshots. Are they afraid to answer or is there something "strange" going on in Muncie?

Update