APM/oilpan quad 1st build from Tolabus Stein on Vimeo.
Arducopter flying on a frame I built from scratch.. Thank you Chris! The new APM worked like a charm.
And thanks to the rest of the DIY DRONES community. This is a way cool..
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I just finished the test of our new opensource long range system modules.
This modules 3th generation and i guess i should design 4th generation before publishing them.
I'm using RFM22B radio modules and ATMEGA328P chips on Rx and Tx.
Rx modules including 8 channel servo ports and RS232 for telemetry uplink
Tx modules including PPM-Input for analog servo control and RS232 for Computer based controls and Telemetry downlink.
System range will be around 4-5km.
Firmware Upgradeable over RS232.
Ground tests was unbelievable, it's working around 500 meters into the city (after 20+ concrete building)
I will share the flight test results, sources and schematics soon.
If you have any idea about design and inputs, please share with me before 4th generation's production..
Thanks for reading
Melih
From FastCompany: "This week marks the third anniversary of ROS (Robot Operating System), an open-source software platform for the robotics industry developed by Stanford and Silicon Valley robotics research lab Willow Garage. In that short time, ROS has skyrocketed in popularity. Robot hardware manufacturers, commercial research labs, and software companies
are all adopting the platform. And ROS is just getting started.
"We set out at the beginning with a commitment to open source," says Steve Cousins, President and CEO of Willow Garage. "In order to get an industry going in personal robotics, it's going to take the ability for a lot of people to experiment. An open platform makes it easy for people to tinker and innovate."
ROS has succeeded beyond Willow Garage's wildest dreams. There are more than 50 public ROS repositories featuring open-source libraries and tools, more than 1,600 software packages, and at least 50 robots around the world using the platform, including underwater vehicles, boats, space rovers, lawnmowers, helicopters, cars, indoor robots, outdoor robots, and more (the Anybots QB robot recently covered by Fast Company doesn't use ROS, however).
The platform probably won't stop growing anytime soon. "When you're growing exponentially, the future is really hard to predict. One of the really powerful things about open source is that by giving up control, you allow the community to do much more than you could possibly do yourself," says Ken Conley, a senior software engineer at Willow Garage.
Willow Garage does have one big hope for ROS: that it will take on a life of its own, outside of the nurturing Willow Garage environment. The company is in the beginning stages of developing an independent ROS Foundation inspired by the Mozilla Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and the GNOME Foundation. "We're talking about this with a number of government agencies and robotics companies," Cousins says. "It will be an independent organization funded by the community, chartered with moving ROS forward."
I know this has been discussed before, but do you think APM could ever get to this level of ease of setup and use?
Arrive at the field, unpack the plane, open your laptop, fly... seems so quick and easy.
That said, please, if you're a .NET developer who's considering creating and selling a commercial program there are programs out there like .NET Reflector (FREE) which can easily disassemble and display your code in seconds.... Do yourself a favor and look into obfuscation software for .NET which will atleast make it harder to disassemble and will, for the most part, stop the casual hacker from viewing your code.
I appreciate all of the positive feedback I've gotten from everyone here and I'm moving forward with the GCS program...in .NET. I am going to release it as open source but I'd like to get more of the development out of the way before I start getting other people involved. I haven't had much success with multi-developer situations and I'd like to get my "big ideas" done before letting everyone else have at it.
Thanks!
We were already using the Gumstix Overo COM in our winning EMAV 2009 entry. Other projects have started to adapt the system design with Linux onboard computer. It separates the Linux computer vision system and control/estimation code running on an external microcontroller. At that time we already did the electronics design for a custom camera board, but eventually used a USB machine vision camera. However now we have a working driver, which allows to attach the Aptina MT9V032 machine vision CMOS sensor directly to the Gumstix Overo COM. The board will be available from Gumstix Inc., but is not yet released as a product. The pxOvero base board weights only 28g including the camera with M12 glass lens! It works under very low light conditions and has a much lower noise level than typical webcams. We hope to see this pair soon in many computer vision MAVs. Our upcoming aerial robotics middleware is lightweight and has been developed so scale to lightweight computers. Together with this camera, it will provide a very convenient toolkit for computer vision on micro air vehicles.
Well it was high time someone won the Adafruit "competition".
Now on to exploit...uh..sorry making good use of his achievements!
See the vid:
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2010/11/10/we-have-a-winner-open-kinect-drivers-released-winner-will-use-3k-for-more-hacking-plus-an-additional-2k-goes-to-the-eff/
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Get the drivers:
http://git.marcansoft.com/?p=libfreenect.git
This project has started with the arrival of the APM / IMU boards in June. Soon I realised, that APM will be more than just copy the software to the board and go flying. From my experiences with microcopter projects, I recognized sometimes the lack of monitoring status information and configuration capabilities at the airfield.
In Europe, most people in RC community are talking about telemetry. Today, there are a couple of manufacturer selling transmitter and receiver with this feature. One manufacturer is selling products with a public known protocol: JETI.
JETI does not sell the complete range of RC equipments. They sell modules or kits for a lot of transmitter used today, receivers and sensors. My transmitter, an older MPX 3010, has been modified with a JETI Duplex TMp transceiver module. This module can be expanded with the JETI-Box Display. Its just a dump display with 4 buttons that acts as a display/input device for a wide range of products from JETI.
Connected to the transceiver, the JET-Box can display data from the tranceiver or the receiver (over air link). If you connect a sensor to the receiver, his data can be displayed as well. With the JETI expander, you can connect more sensors. But the most advantage is, you can configure settings on all devices connected. No need to have a PC with USB cable with you.
Over a couple of weeks, I wrote a library for the communication between APM and the JETI-Box. It acts like a sensor connected to the JETI receiver. The JETI-protocol runs at a baudrate of 9600. It sends 34 bytes per frame to the receiver. Unfortunately, it uses a unusual frametype of 9O1 (9 databit, odd parity, 1 stopbit). Using the FastSerial lib was not possible, so i wrote my own code.
The concept is pretty straight forward. The JETI-Box sends every 180ms a byte containing the button status. When this byte is received, after a 10ms delay, the data for the display is send back. The JETI-Box will send the buttonstatus again, after 10ms - we send updated display data like before.
One of the most problem was the lack of free timers to implement a 10ms delay. A check on the Arduino library lead to a solution. Timer0 is used for the function millis(). It is configured as an overrun timer and therefor the timer0_overrun_interrupt routine is occcupied by Arduino. The other two interrupts (compareA, compareB) are still available. The solution is to set the compareA value to 128 and use this interrupt to run a routine handling the 10ms delay. Please look at the code for more details.
Changing parameters inside APM is not implemented at the moment. This will take one or the other week.
Project documentations could be found here, pics are here
Uwe Gartmann
TrIMUpter - GPS Position hold test with ArduIMU + GPS EM406 on Vimeo.
Hello, I have successfully tested the GPS position hold with my TrIMUpter (a VTOL tricopter).
The full stabilisation process is simply done with:
- an ArduIMU+ V2 flat,
- a triple axis magnetometer (HMC5843),
- a GPS EM406,
so this is a very cheap setup.
Below a photo of the setup used:
The TrIMUpter is stabilised by the firmware TriStab v2.1
Some features of the firmware v2.1:
- Full stabilisation process required for a multicopter,
- GPS position hold, tested with the GPS EM406, and compatible with Ublox, NMEA, and Mediatek MTK ,
- a true Heading Lock for the yaw with 2 modes: inertial heading lock or magnetic heading lock,
- self-calibration of the IMU sensors,
- self-test at the startup for valid datas from the HMC5843 triple axis magnetometer,
- the switch from the "stabilisation mode" to "the GPS position hold" is done with switch linked to the ch5,
- the Roll/Pitch PID gains can be easily tuned via the transmitter knob linked to the ch6,
- the main servo mixer is placed in one function "call_servomix()" and can be easily modified for multicopters
and also helicopters...
The firmware TriStab v2.1 can be downloaded here.
Have fun and happy dev,
Jean-Louis
- Payload until 10 kg in order to fly :)
- 3 16x10 Propeller
Original blog post : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/tel-mega-tricopter
Regards
Roberto
Just a quick post to give you the address of my personal website.
I describe the construction of my tricopter with photos, videos and links to supply equipment.
http://lolocharbonnier.pagesperso-orange.fr/topic/index-en.html
Regards
Laurent
"The MPU-6000 is the world’s first integrated 6-axis motion processor that eliminates gyro/accel cross-axis misalignment and offers dramatic package size reduction compared with multi-chip solutions. The MPU-6000 has an embedded 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer, and Digital Motion Processor™ (DMP™) hardware accelerator engine with a secondary I2C port that interfaces to third party accelerometer, compass, or other sensors to deliver a complete 9-axis sensor fusion output to its primary I2C port as a single data stream for the application.
The InvenSense Motion Processing Library abstracts motion-based complexities, offloads sensor management from the operating system and provides a structured set of APIs for application development.
For precision tracking of both fast and slow motions, the part features a user-programmable gyro full-scale range of ±250, ±500, ±1000, and ±2000°/sec (dps) and a user-programmable accelerometer full-scale range of ±2g, ±4g, ±8g, and ±16g. Communication of the device is performed using either I2C at up to 400kHz or SPI at up to 20MHz."
I'm not sure about the pricing, but given that it's targeted at game controllers and tablets, it should be pretty cheap.
They did it. AEROPAK is a UAV specific powering solution. It runs just on water (hydrogen fuel) and delivers lots and lots of electricity.
This product has unbeliavable charateristics compared to our primitive battery packs, allowing looong flight times. I discovered it today, and am waiting for a quote from Horizon Energy Systems. They also sell a complete hydrogen power ssolution for RC cars.
New horizons for us! Enjoy
All Things That Fly is by far the best RC podcast, a weekly romp of news, information and entertaining banter on the RC world, by a cast of charismatic hobbyists. It's the highlight of my commutes and a must-subscribe from anyone into RC.
This week Jamie was kind enough to invite me on to talk about DIY Drones and the launch of the ArduCopter project. Listen here and subscribe via RSS here.
For the first time in the history of the IMAV events, teams can apply for borrowing an MAV platform for use in the competitions. The IMAV 2011 Summer edition is sponsored by Parrot, the producer of the Parrot AR Drones. Parrot has made it possible for the IMAV organization to lend drones to teams that wish to focus on the artificial intelligence / software part of the competitions.
The procedure for applying for borrowing a Parrot AR Drone:
1. Write a short plan for the competition(s) in which your team wants to participate. Send it to: microuav -at- gmail.com
2. The IMAV 2011 organization evaluates the incoming proposals and notifies the team whether it can borrow a Parrot AR Drone.
3. Register the team and its members for the competition(s) and the conference.
4. After payment of at least two team members, and acceptance of the conditions for borrowing the platform, the Parrot AR Drone will be sent. As a preliminary indication for the conference registration costs, a student pays only 150 Euro for the entire conference / competition, including conference dinner ticket.
Please note that the NUMBER OF DRONES IS LIMITED, and we will assign them on a first-come first-serve basis, if the quality of the proposals is sufficiently high.
Sparkfun founder Nathan Siedle gave a great speech at Google the other day about history of the company and the new DIY electronics movement that they (and we) are part of. The full text and slides are here, but here's just one brief excerpt:
"We were talking over lunch one day, and he says “You know what? SparkFun is like Home Depot.” You go to Home Depot, and you walk down the store and there's wood and there's screws and there's plaster there. But you don't expect to see a bathroom on the shelf that you can just pick up and put in your cart, right? They may have demos. They may have different things showing you how you could redo your bathroom, but they don't sell you the bathroom. That's how it works at SparkFun. We don't sell you a cell phone. We don't sell you a laser pointer. We show you the bits and pieces that you could string together to build something interesting, and we educate you how to do it. And we encourage people to do it themselves."
Here's an update on the ArduPilotMeta software roadmap:
- The current public (zip file) code is the ArduPilotMega 1.0 Beta. We update that every week or two with the latest bug fixes (the version that went up last night fixes a bug with centripetal acceleration handling. If you're using the 1.0 beta you should update it with this latest version). You can see if you have the latest code by looking at the upload date. This is a fully functional autopilot and many people are flying it now, but it is a beta so we're very keen to get flight and bug reports so we can improve it. As always, file bug reports in the Issue Tracker, not as comments here.
- The next release will be APM 1.0 (not beta), which should be out in about a month. This will be integrated with a new Ground Station (GCS) that can handle in-flight uploading of mission command and PID gains, rather than just using the standard ArduPilot GCS in legacy mode is we do currently. It will also fully support the very cool Debug Terminal, which can give you very detailed data and control over APM functions in flight. You can watch our progress on this version in the SVN trunk, but we recommend that you do NOT try to run or fly this code; it changes every day and is often untested. We cannot offer support for this code or answer questions, simply because it's unfinished and if we have to explain our work in progress all the time we won't be able to finish it!
- Planning work on the APM 2.0 code is underway. Goals include adaptive control (so you won't have to manually set PID gains), better AI, more camera control including automatic location tracking, and easier setup processes, including an installation file that can allow people to use APM without ever having to see code or touch the Arduino IDE if they don't want to. We're looking at spring 2011 for a public beta.
- Meanwhile, the ArduCopter quadcopter and helicopter branches of the project are making rapid progress. The quad team, which already has a very smooth flying public beta, should be adding GPS position hold in the next week, and waypoints and GCS support shortly thereafter. The heli team (which is using the Trex 450 platform) has achieved good flying performance and should be releasing public code this month, too.
Here are some brief details:
KDA20-22L motors, Turnigy 30A ESC's converted to I2C, APC 10 x 4.7 props, UBEC, GWS RX8 receiver, 10mm sq aluminium frame with pcb central hub and mounting plates
RC1 code modified to add I2C motor control and mixertable for controlling 8motors. ArduOktoKopter.zip
Peter
