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This week in aerospace

Posted by Jack Crossfire on May 21, 2010 at 8:30pm

Camera mounts, Paramodels, Zeppelins, Marcy 1 bicopter



After a hard week of jury duty, Marcy 1 is getting converted to a bicopter like the Bladestar. In exchange for requiring more wing area for a given amount of lift, bicopters have a smaller rotor diameter & cancelling pitch forces which hopefully allow a smaller balance beam or lower RPM.

A sad finish to monocopters, for the moment. Still hope an outdoor monocopter can be built to give the maximum hover time per mA.

Marcy 1's main problem is a new radio crash where the serial port is suddenly locking up. Looks like a silicon defect.





New camera mounts for Vika 1 press forward. This is supposed to work with a ny tie or a servo. Main issue now is the A490 no longer exposes the shutter signal anywhere accessible without destroying the main board.





PARAMODELS


Paragliders are finally catching on, powered by European ingenuity.

http://opale-paramodels.com

The 1st pocketable UAV's with useful payload & flight time are going to be a parafoils. They spend a lot of time making lifelike male pilot figures, but the general idea is 2 brake lines attach to 2 servos.


Finally, in case your boss doesn't give you enough time off to watch a zeppelin maneuvering, it's the Airship Ventures blimp doing somezigzags & pitching. Unfortunately, Canon autofocus wasn't there, so
the 10MP photos had to be shrunken to 640x480.




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Flytron FC-422 Indoor & Outdoor Submicro Camera

Posted by Melih Karakelle on May 21, 2010 at 6:29am
Hi Guys,

I'm glad to announce our new submicro camera

FC-422 is upgraded version of our submicro FC-420 camera.
It's including 2 times bigger lens and 2 times wider image sensor which means, light sensitivity 4 times higher than FC-420 cameras. and only 0.40gr heavier then FC-420
fc-422.jpg
VIDEO FORMAT: NTSC
HORIZONTAL RESOLUTION: 420TVL
VOLTAGE: 3.3-5.5V (1 cell Lipo)

We are selling these cameras with Day(Outdoor) and Night(Indoor) lenses.

You can use them with your ultralight Outdoor and Indoor FPV/UAV platforms, i hope you will like it ;)

This is the test video of camera's night vision and indoor capability.


Thanks for reading
Melih
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3D Robotics

Hang out with the DIY Drones crew at Maker Faire this weekend

Posted by Chris Anderson on May 20, 2010 at 7:50pm

A bunch of the DIY Drones crew are going to be at Maker Faire this weekend, which promises to be completely mindblowing. Expect 100,000 people over Sat and Sun, and the lineup of projects on display is like nothing you've ever seen before. Many hundreds of groups just like ours, with DIY innovations from robotics and rocketry to biotech. Plus a show by the band Ok Go with Diet Coke/Mentos fireworks!


Jordi Munoz and I will be giving UAV demos at the GeekDad booth and the Maker Shed, along with quadcopter demos on the Innovation Stage at 4:30 on both Sat and Sun. Come by and say hi!

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AGV update

Posted by Patrick Mccabe on May 20, 2010 at 4:22pm

Update 5.20.10

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDOL6O9PQzc

This idea came to me in math class when i was talking to one of my friends about this robot.

So whats new? BUTTONS!

I added 2 buttons. The one on the right is for storing waypoints. Now all i have to do is push the button and it stores the current location as a waypoint. This is done to store all the waypoints. There is also a LED that lights up to show that it is storing a waypoint. When you are done storing waypoints, then push the left button and the AGV drives the waypoint path. So no more must i lug my laptop around and read the serial monitor, write down the gps points, upload the gps points to the arduino. I now just push these little buttons which i took from a old rc controller from a cheap toy. When i am able to test this at my test site, i will add a better video of it driving in the comments below so be on the look out for it.

Here is the full post on my AGV from start to finish

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Palm GCS Preface Needed

Posted by Marc Daniels on May 20, 2010 at 9:52am
I should have prefaced this series of blog entries with the following:

My ideas for this design center around the need for a stable aircraft, either via its own inherent stability and/or provided by an on-board IMU or AHRS. In my case I'm relying on an ArduIMU for stabilization. Once I get the time I'd like to study further the possibility of using one 3 axis accelerometer for short-term pitch and roll stabilization for inherently stable airframes. I'm flying foam aircraft, up to 24 oz in weight and really low wing loadings so this design concept is not a one-size-fits all out-of-box. Right now my airborne code is very simple. The ArduIMU takes over as soon as all channel changes stop. So it is a crude fly-by-wire setup. The ArduIMU roll also limits the roll of aircraft to 60 degrees even under manual control.

I haven't gotten into the PID, turn-rates, navigation, and other heavy computing and will definitely be studying the ArduPilot code for guidance.

I want to give a big 'thank you' to all those responsible for developing and sharing ArduPilot, especially Chris and Jordi, you are an inspiration to us all.


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Admin

Pilotless Aircraft Approved for Texas Airspace : Good times to come

Posted by Morli on May 20, 2010 at 9:28am
Pilotless Aircraft Approved for Texas Airspace

FLY1209_UAV1_1000x674.jpg


Beginning next month, more unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) will patrol portions of the U.S.-Mexican border from Arizona to the El Paso area of Texas. Three of the remotely piloted aircraft are already flying and the FAA approved a certificate of authorization (COA) for the expanded flights. A second COA is pending approval, championed in part by Texas congressman Henry Cuellar, who cites a ramp up in border violence as the reason for approving the surveillance flights. Approval of the second COA would enable UAV flights over the remainder of the Texas border — extending to the Gulf Coast. U.S. Customs and Border Protection intends to cover all borders with the flights by 2015. Click here to read Lane Wallace's story about unmanned aircraft systems as seen in Flying.
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Palm GCS Continued

Posted by Marc Daniels on May 20, 2010 at 8:30am
I'm using a baud rate of 38400 for all serial ports; xbee's, Arduino to Palm, ArduIMU to Arduino Mega etc. I found that the higher baud rates increased latency on xbee's but didn't troubleshoot further to really explain the issue. With the packet size and baud rate as they are, the largest packet still allow a long enough time between packets for easy decoding and processing before the next packet arrives, at either end. On the GCS side I'm simply passing every byte as it arrives to the Palm. The Arduino manages the thumb sticks processing, I don't do any control yet using the Palm. I have a landing screen with a simple ILS indicator but have yet to perfect the GPS processing to make it work.

My ultimate goal with this project is a fully autonomous vehicle, able to launch, fly, and land under its own control. So I'm working it up in stages, manual control, fly-by-wire, autonomous flight, autonomous landing, etc...

I'll start posting some code, schematics and documentation as I get it organized but none of it is out of the ordinary for here. Hopefully the following will answer any questions:

Important hardware bits:

To interface with a Palm you'll need a level shifter to get the Palm side to read standard RS-232 signals, 5V won't work. I use one of these and it works well.

The thumb sticks are not very good compared to RC sticks. The range of motion on them is really small. To get reasonable controlability out of them I use exponential throw for them and this works well. The push-button feature of them is however nice. I'll eventually use it on both sticks to change flight modes and other functions. If I ever move this design into a real enclosure I'll probably switch to RC sticks.

So far everything I'm using is common off-the-shelf stuff with the exception of the airborne ArduPilot Mega Beta, I thought it a good recycling project for it, but a regular Arduino Mega will do, or as an alternative , use a Arduino Pro Mini with serial port used for Xbee and I2C for IMU (if you use it).

I use a UBEC on the airborne side for the servo's and a separate one for all the electronics. Ground testing showed voltage drops from heavy servo use so I want to make sure the electronics have thier own clean power. I fly heli's and voltage drops are typical when running servos off the ESC's BEC, so all my heli's have servo UBECs.

The thumb sticks and enclosure layout is very comfortable as-is. I power the GCS off a 750mah 3S and get over an 2 hours of use out of it.

Edit: I forgot to mention the throttle control using the thumb stick: You can open up the stick and remove the spring, but I managed to wreck 2 trying this. After removing the spring, you need to reassemble it and to do so means bending the little metal tabs back over the plastic, press to hard and you can crush the whole thing so be careful if you try this.


Important software bits:

So far I've avoided using any timer or interrupts to keep the code simple for the Arduino side of things.

Servo control:
I originally used 2 bytes for the channel data in order to get the microsecond resolution on the servo's but after comparing that to single digit degree resolution I couldn't tell the difference so dropped to 1 byte channel positions. Micro second resolution would be needed for a quad rotor.

Palm:
The Palm software I'm using (Handheld Basic HH++) is free for non-commercial use. It runs on most any Palm going back to version 3.5. I've got a box full of Vx's I bought of ebay for $15 and a couple m500. The m500 is better since it has a SD Card slot for data logging. I just got a spare serial cable for mine and have yet to modify it for the GCS. The Palm processor in these older models can handle the graphics needs for simple UAV displays, and at the baud rate I'm using easily keeps up with the data refresh rate. The rate I get allows me to fly looking at the display if needed.
Since the display on the palm is limited, I use a small area in the lower left corner as a simple 'master caution' panel. When ever an alert occurs (low fuel, signal loss, etc) a click-able message is displayed along with a unique frequency beep. The alerts are prioritized and the message remains until it is cleared. Any lower priority messages will then display for clearing. There are only 5 or so alerts so the sound alone tells me whats up without having to look down.


Gotta get to work....







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Palm GCS Continued

Posted by Marc Daniels on May 20, 2010 at 8:05am
There is no RC TX or RX in my setup.

The XBee is a Pro, 900Mhz, and it I found it isn't the baud rate that is most important like some have suggested. At first I attempted to use the Xbee like a RC TX/RX sending channel updates at 50HZ and the result was 'latency'. This was caused by the buffers of the XBees filling faster then they were emptied, so what I was seeing was data up to a half a second old.

What does work is to send the least amount of data needed at a rate the Xbee can both process the incoming stream and output the stream. My latest version only sends channel changes to the airborne XBee and the airborne xbee sends channel positions at 20hz. Even when moving the sticks rapidly, the channel changes move the servos good resolution and no latency. The channel positions and expected positions are compare in the GCS and differences result in the GCS resending a servo position. So far I haven't recorded a single instance where the resend was needed.

To keep the xbee workload down (and latency to a minimum) all data is transmitted in binary. The largest packet of data that is sent from the airborne xbee is only 26 bytes big. Since the xbee's PAN ID handle the interference I only have a short preamble (!!!), a one byte Unit ID (for multiple airborne units), and a one byte packet id. The airborne xbee sends 2 types of packets, fast changing data (channel+attitude ) at 20hz, and slow changing data (way point changes+battery voltage+GPS Fix type+GPS Satelites) . This simple protocol seems to work and pose minimal overhead to the Palm and Arduino's. The Palm development software is nice in that the serial stream reader is type specific so once a preamble is detected, reading the packet data into variable is as easy as:

ss.read aMode
ss.read aRoll
ss.read aPitch
ss.read aThrottle
ss.read aLatitude
ss.read aLongitude
ss.read aAltitude
ss.read aRollAttitude
ss.read aPitchAttitude
ss.read aGroundSpeed
ss.read aAirSpeed
ss.read aCourse
ss.read aClimbRate
ss.read aRSSI
ss.read aFuel
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Palm GCS

Posted by Marc Daniels on May 19, 2010 at 10:48pm
I've been toying with this design for a few weeks and thought I'd post it. I'm using a Palm Vx, Arduino Mega, and XBee Pro for a ground control station. It's pretty rough at the moment. The airborne portion is made up of a ArduPilot Mega beta and a XBee pro. After building a airborne system using a Turborix Satelite receiver and Arduino I decided to eliminate the 'RC' equipment from the design completely. It was surprisingly easy and the range of the XBee Pro is better than my RC equipment. Here is the ground station with a simulated signal running to it:




It is really minimal, and designed to be easily read while flying. The scroll bars are F-Fuel, C-Climb Rate, S-Air Speed, and R-Airborne Receiver Signal Strength. I tried a fully graphic horizon but couldn't see it well so switch to a simple roll and pitch indicator. The pitch indicate shows +-60 degrees, higher angles have the pitch line pegged at max. This allows me to fly looking at the Palm. The scroll bars are set to the typical range expected for the flight. I'm using an ArduIMU for stabilization and am working towards a complete fly-by-wire software before going to full auto-pilot.

Here some pictures, don't laugh :), it is a rough 'sketch'. If I ever find the time I'll move it into a nice enclosure but its tupperware for now:


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Drones to help track US border in summer

Posted by Mark Willis on May 19, 2010 at 3:09pm

On a visit to El Paso this weekend, I noticed this article on front page of the El Paso Times concerning US border drone use.

One interesting tid bit, "Perez said the Department of Homeland Security and members of Congress have been frustrated with the FAA because it has been slow in approving the department's request for the drones." Sound familiar?

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3D Robotics

Best BlimpDuino mod ever. iPad control!

Posted by Chris Anderson on May 19, 2010 at 5:30am

"New York-based BREAKFAST fitted a BlimpDuino with on-board video and wireless control system and took it out for a spin at a party to interact with the crowd. Everybody's favorite controller du jour, an iPad, was employed to orient the dirigible and act as a augmented display medium."

Plus a live onboard video feed and headlights!


[From Makezine]

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ArduIMU for Quads !

Posted by Earl on May 18, 2010 at 4:00pm
Here is my contribution using a lot of other peoples code and help.
I did find how to interface the Parallax Ping sonar sensor to the IMU board.
Jose has code but for a different sensor. I only had a Ping sensor laying around.
I also read all 8 RC channels to be able to use any for control etc.
Zip file here also.Quad_mini_1_30_rangefinderPINGch8.zip

Earl



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Cheap keychain camera

Posted by CrashingDutchman on May 18, 2010 at 12:00pm
Back in december there was this blog-post about a keychain camera. Today Hobbyking has launched a similar camera: . It does 640x480 at 30fps and co
mes with a 2GB SD card included.

RD16.jpg


Now, the camera in the blog post from December has a higher resolution than this new Turnigy camera. Hobbyking mentions that too, but says (fwiw): Other similar cameras have software AVI formatting to 720x480px,reducing clarity of the 640x480 native image from the lense. While this
sounds good on paper, it makes the movie less clear and enjoyable.


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Hobbyking 's new PPM Signal Mixer for their Head-Movement-Tracker Gyro.

Posted by CrashingDutchman on May 17, 2010 at 2:30am
Hobbyking release today a PPM Signal Mixer version B fortheir Head-Movement-Tracker Gyro. This will help people with entry level Futaba transmitter to use the HT. Basically, from what I understand from the description, it adds channels to the ppm stream generated by your transmitter. If your transmitter has 6 channels, it becomes an 8-channel TX (you need a 8 channel receiver to really use it, of course).

From the website:
PPM Signal Mixer is specifically designed for those who own low end Futaba transmitters (such as the 6EX), allowing you to also use thehead movement tracking system. And even can be used with JRtransmitters. (soon available)

This version B is designed for 6EXtransmitter which comes with 8 channels receiver.
Just connect the PPM signal mixer inbetween the Advance Head-Movement-Tracker Gyro and the Transmitter and PPM signalmixer will map new channels special for X-GYRO 1000 via the transmitter.Then it maps 2 channels, and put them after the transmitter channels,now it’s 7 CH and 8 CH, that ‘s why you need a 8CH receiver. Connect theservos to 7CH and 8CH.
Note: Only works with Futaba transmitters.

Spec.
Weight: 4g
Voltage Supply: 8V-12V

PPM-Mix-1.jpg




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3D Robotics

Tip for ArduPilot 2.6 users: disable the Z sensor for now

Posted by Chris Anderson on May 16, 2010 at 10:05pm
Jason Short and I were testing 2.6 today and discovered something funky with the Z sensor calibration (he doesn't use one; I do). Until we sort it out, it's best to disable the Z sensor. Just set this line to 0, as shown below

#define ENABLE_Z_SENSOR 0

Although the code will eventually auto-calibrate without the Z sensor, you can calibrate it immediately on the ground before flying. Just hold the plane vertically and rotate it all the way around so each window of the XY sensor gets pointed at the sky at least once. This has the effect of setting the max readings for each side (which is actually all the Z sensor does). Once you've done that you can launch and it should be calibrated right off the bat.


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Developer

Quick Post: ArduPilotMega Shield/OilPan Photos!

Posted by Jordi Muñoz on May 16, 2010 at 10:30am

Is not ready yet, has tiny mistakes, but the tweaked boards is under the last hardware performance test's , as soon as i get an answer, I will start the mass production... ETA two weeks! (Maybe sooner).

The shield can be bottom placed (oil pan) or in the top (Shield). I would suggest the bottom side so you protect the IC's and have a lower profile!

Poll: Do you prefer the Shield in Red or Blue?

See ya!









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Flight Control Board trial run. part2

Posted by Ho-Chung Chang on May 15, 2010 at 7:15pm
I had got sensor board yesterday, and assembled it to FCB. It's disappointed that GPS can not receive the satellite signal. I think maybe SC-1513 GPS module's antenna layout is difference with MSTAR GPS modules.(I don't sure.XD).

But the 6DoF IMU run very well.


Bug Fix:

1.Gps antenna layout.

2.5V-->3.3V , 3.3V --> 5V level shift modifidy.

3.Add MPXV5004 Differential PressureSensor for Airspeed.


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