Blogs

This site is just a few days old, but might be worth checking out if you're looking to work in the UAV industry. Seems like a pretty good start so far.

Powered by a 48 Mhz Atmel AT91SAM7X512 Free tools, all open source code and hardware .NET Micro Framework Event-based programming, multi-threading, line-by-line debugging, and breakpoints.

http://www.netduino.com/

Amazing price I think for only $34.95...mine is coming this Friday...new toys. This will bring a lot of high level programmers into the embedded world, I believe. What would you do with it?

1. High Density routing for swarms of uavs - and manned planes.
   
2. Real-time deconfliction - immediate reaction to changes
3. Infinite scalability - with only local communication.
4. Deconfliction over non-airport hot spots like traffic, crime and accident scenes, borders, ships or oil rigs, ad hoc disaster and military sites.
5. Mixed types and sizes of aircraft with unique separation requirements, power, speed etc...
   
6. Deconflicts airplanes on the ground as well as in the air.
7. Listen and avoid potential (small devices without transmitters).
8. Can be used for ground vehicle, boats, or subs (provided they have localization).
   

The PixHawk team in Switzerland, which has been doing great work with quadcopters and ground stations (we're evaluating their GCS for the APM), is planning to release their IMU and autopilot commercially. Before they do so, they'd like some community feedback on what you'd like to use it for and which features you'd like.

Vote here!

Pictured is the mostly completed ground station, and some of the vehicle-side stuff.

The ground station consists of an Arduino mega, an SFE joystick shield, a Nokia 6100 LCD, and a cheap 4800 baud wireless serial modem, which is hidden behind the LCD. I plan on replacing the serial modem with an Xbee pro soon, but the TX/RX pair was only $10 total, so I figured it'd work for inital debugging and testing.

The plane components here are another arduino, with the wireless RX, elevator and rudder servos, and a 4DS TTL-level camera.

Everything works well, except for the camera. Hooked directly to the mega at 57600 baud and lowest RAW resolution, I averaged about 0.5 fps to the screen. I don't even what to think about what it would be like over a 4800baud connection, let alone an Xbee a hundred feet in the air. My question thus is - what would a good NTSC-output camera be, and what would be a good transmitter and receiver unit for that camera? The Xbee I plan on getting is 2.4ghz, so I would need something that would not interfere with that. Thanks!

Stumbled onto this...

http://www.xsens.com/en/general/mti-g

I hope you like it! ;)

PS.:The location of XBee on the illustrations will be tested soon by Jani. We need to know if it will cause interferences on the magnetometer.

on his Sunday CNN Show, Fareed Zakaria recommended this book and said it was relevant to the modern discussion of Ideas as Property (Patents). I should very much like to hear the perspective of DIY thinkers on the relative merits of Idea ownership, Idea sharing, and how they might reform the current Patent system. Is it still a tool for social mobility - and impetus for the Industrial revolution - as it was for Watts and his Steam engine - or has it been captured by static institutions in a way that precludes growth - especially from new entrants? Has the narrative of a man, a plan, a steam engine - become overwhelmed by patent sweatshops at MS and HP patenting the obvious and mundane, as a means of pulling up the ladder?

Congrats to Bill Premerlani and the rest of the UAVDevBoard team for a great writeup on the Sparkfun front page!

Here's how it starts:

"The UAV Development Platform has been available on SparkFun's website for almost four years now. In that time, much progress has been made. A group of UAV pilots from across the globe have assembled and put their heads together to develop an extremely powerful control platform for RC airplanes and RC helicopters."

...and then it goes on to talk about the acrobatic potential of the platform and to hint of new hardware in the pipeline.

And for an animated view of the above mission (if you have Google Earth installed), click here.

Now that the DIY Drones community is more than 20,000 people, we're getting a lot of requests to participate in our various projects. That's terrific and we absolutely love and depend on the work of volunteers here. It's also a fun and rewarding experience for the dev team members: they get to help determine the path of these projects along with inventing new ones, see their contributions used by thousands of people, work with other awesome talents and get all the free hardware they need, along with prototypes of new products.

But it's often hard to figure out exactly what jobs are right for which people, and how to add people to existing teams without causing disruption and slowing everything down with training and communications (the "Mythical Man Month" problem).

We currently have more than 40 core developers working on ArduPlane, ArduCopter, ArduRover, various ground stations and hardware spin offs, along with several dozen other contributors. That's nearly fully staffed, and requires nearly full time coordination of the various mailing lists, code repositories, wikis, Google Docs planning documents and weekly Skype dev chats. But we do want to have a path by which new contributors can join, in a way that slots them in best both for their own interests and skills and the projects' needs. This ensures that we're constantly refreshing the dev teams with new ideas and energy, and taking the load off core developers as the projects expand and life occasionally intrudes.

The best way to participate is to do something cool on your own and share it here. All of our code bases and hardware design files are open. If you see an opportunity to improve something, just do it, post it and then tell the community about what you've done. If it's good, people will use it, help improve it, and we'll get a sense of what you can do. That makes it much easier for us to figure out what your skills are and where you'd fit in best.

Here's a list of project you can get started on now.

So bottom line: see something you think you can improve? Just do it. If it's cool, your reputation here will grow and you'll be much in demand. It's as simple as that.

[photo at top taken by me of the Arduino team, which operates similarly]

Today everybody and their dog seem to be working on a quad project. And with my own quad having reached a relatively mature stage with stable flight some time ago, I thought it would be nice to try something different.

So inspired by the full-size Osprey tilt rotor design I just started an experimental duo/tilt copter build. Frankly I am far from sure if it will ever fly, but that is what makes it fun!

Mechanical:

My tilt design is one I used in an earlier tri-copter build. I insert a 8mm CF rods into a 750x10,5mm CF square tube and glued then together. A modified T-Rex 600 blade-holder is then inserted on the 8mm tube and fastened using glue. Finally a servo is epoxied at the side of the square tube and linked to the 600 blade-holder. Motor and ESC is a cheap TowerPro combo from HobbyKing. Cheap and easy to replace when experimenting, and the ESC has no problem handling 333mhz PWM pulses.

This is my first post to diydrones.com.

I think that it would be very nice to use same ArduPilot software in real life and with simulator.

So, according this blog post http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/the-ardupilot-fg-control-for

I have modified ArduPilot so it can be used with Flight Gear Simulator.

Download:

http://www.rytkonen.org/ardupilot/ArduPilot_2_6_2_flightgear.zip.

http://www.rytkonen.org/ardupilot/ArduPilot_2_7_beta3_flightgear.zip

Here are some instructions, how I got everything work with Windows.

Hardware
- You only need to connect power source and FTDI cable to ArduPilot.
- Simulator does not work with shields and GPS installed. So remove them from ArduPilot.
- Install code to ArduPilot with Arduino IDE

Installing FlightGear in Windows
- Download and Install FlightGear Simulator

Create batch file

run.bat

cd C:\PROGRA~1\FlightGear\BIN\win32

SET FG_HOME=c:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear

SET FG_ROOT=c:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear/data

SET FG_SCENERY=C:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear/data/Scenery;C:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear/scenery;C:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear/terrasync;c:/terrasync

fgfs.exe --aircraft=c172p-2dpanel --control=mouse --disable-intro-music --disable-random-objects --prop:/sim/rendering/random-vegetation=false --disable-ai-models --geometry=800x600 --bpp=32 --timeofday=noon --native-fdm=socket,out,10,127.0.0.1,5500,udp --native-ctrls=socket,in,10,127.0.0.1,5600,udp --native-ctrls=socket,out,10,127.0.0.1,5700,udp --fg-root=C:/PROGRA~1/FlightGear/data --altitude=9999 --atlas=socket,out,5,localhost,5505,udp

ArduFGcontrol
- Download ArduFGcontrol from here
- Edit settings file as described in Readme.txt

Upload Waypoints to ArduPilot
- Download a sample mission file for the ArduFGControl from here (Mission.zip)

- Install waypoints to ArduPilot with ConfigTool. Download it from http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot/downloads/list

Ready for Takeoff
- Start ArduFGcontrol
- Start FlightGear by running BAT you just created

If you want install RC plane model to Flight Gear, you can download from here. Save unzipped files to Aircrafts-folder.

The next mod to my Easystar, a larger rudder made out of balsa and installed with dubro hinges.

There seemed to be 2 main ways to increase the performance of the rudder on the Easystar the first would be to just extend the length of the current rudder and the second would be to increase both the height and the length by completely replacing the rudder surface, for my mod I opted for the second option.

I started by cutting the old foam rudder off the airframe and then continued the cut up to the top of the vertical fin this will allow me to make a rudder that would have a full height control surface.

I decided that I would make the new rudder out of balsa and would attach it with dubro nylon hinges. I made a paper pattern from the foam rudder and fin part that I cut from the Easystar I then extended the length so that the new rudder reached out as far as the elevator trailing edge.

I cut 3 identical patterns from a sheet of 2mm balsa, on one of the patterns I marked out and notched cutaways for the hinges, this will be the centre layer. I decided to make this a laminate part so that I could neatly install the hinges and then sandwich all the parts together. Next I glued the centre and the first of the outer parts of the balsa together, this can been seen in the picture above. I left the join to cure over night with 20 hardback books stacked on top.

The hinges were then glued into the notched area's with CA before finally gluing the balsa part on top, again this was compressed and left to fix over night. It is worth while to tape around the exposed hinges while doing any gluing.

The picture above shows the parts laminated together with some initial shape sanding done. I also drilled the rudder at each of the hinges and pinned through each hinge with a cocktail stick to secure the hinges.

I completed the shape sanding by checking the shape and clearances against the airframe and adjusted where necessary. I applied 4 coats of sanding sealer rubbing down with fine sandpaper between each coat and then 2 coats of red paint. The final task on the rudder was to install a new control horn and I decided to fit a bolt on version instead of the glue on version that came with the Easystar kit.

For installation onto the airframe I marked the 4 hinge positions on the vertical fin and using a sharp blade made incisions into the foam for each of the hinges. After a test fit and a few dry runs I glued the hinges in with CA, you must be very careful not to get glue on the actual hinge area!!

Now i need to get some practice flying in while I wait for flyable APM code to be released.

As you can see from the vid, the bots have a lot of fairly complicated tasks to perform, and I imagine that being underwater causes a whole host of sensor issues… For example, several tasks require the robots to differentiate colored objects, and colors change underwater depending on depth as the red light gets filtered out. Not to mention the whole water not mixing with electronics thing…"

quadcopter overview from Brothers Olson on Vimeo.

Oh no I'm making this quad world, funny how quad posts all arrive together just like buses, I thought this chap had done well and this was worth sharing.

Looking further they seem to know what they are doing...

Quad Copter footage from Brothers Olson on Vimeo.