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Webbie Test Flight

Posted by Mike Bakula on January 18, 2010 at 6:00pm
The Project SOAR group at Embry-Riddle got into the air again today. Although we couldn't get any time on the Autopilot (some problem with reading the Ublox5 GPS) we were able to test the Webbie as an on-board camera. The camera was attached to the EasyStar with 2" Velcro, which works well;

We mounted it screen-down, so the video would be upside-down. This is easily fixed in IMovie.

And here's the result!

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Another UAV-specific Job Posting - Systems Engineer

Posted by Paul Marsh on January 18, 2010 at 6:34am
In my own job search, I came across the following post which might be of interest to some here. BTW, I realize that anyone in the job market themselves would most likely find these posts on their own. On the other hand, anyone not proactively looking might see something that would interest them. Still, if the moderators would prefer I not post these when I come across them, just let me know. Thanks.Systems Engineer - UAV Operator/Operations
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Borjet MAJA CAD Model

Posted by Sentinel on January 16, 2010 at 8:42am

I've spent a few months watching DIY Drones and trying to absorb as much information as possible. It's a fantastic grass roots resource which invites one to participate in both the craft of sUAV building as well as the website.While planning out a future project, I generated a CAD model of the Borjet Maja airframe. The measurements may not be exact all over as not many details or schematics are available, however I know that the important bit - the cargo space - is exact.Anyway, I thought I'd post it here just in case it is of use to anyone else considering using the Maja as their platform. Feel free to bend/break/improve the work. If anyone wants alternative formats, just give me a shout and I'll try to sort it. (Click images to download).Cheers all,Rich.
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U.S. Diverts Spy Drone from Afghanistan to Haiti

Posted by Simon Wood on January 15, 2010 at 1:00pm
Obviously there is a lot of focus on trying to help out following the Haiti earthquake.Drones are showing their usefulness:http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/01/pentagon-shares-earthquake-images-from-high-flying-spy-drone/Also OpenStreetMap are doing a lot of map tracing from donated aerial photography and making these maps for aid workers on the ground. You too can help by tracing/marking features....http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haitihttp://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Haiti/Press_infoSimon(aka. Mungewell)
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MARCY-1 LIFTS OFF

Posted by Jack Crossfire on January 15, 2010 at 10:30am

There it is. Marcy-1's first free flight on the golf course.The 900Mhz RC transmitter interferes with the telemetry receiver even though they're on opposite ends of 915Mhz. You need to keep them separated or on different bands, which requires rebuilding the entire transmitter.The notoriously fickle capture compare on the PIC is still extremely hard to get working in the field.

Salute the Mar.

By now, we realized she had a serious roll oscillation which is probably from not having enough weight on the balace beam.

Longest flight.

Last flight, ending in a tree impact.

Marcy-1, warrior copter.THE 900MHZ NIGHTMARE

Tracked down the SI4421 problem to a floating solder joint. The SI4421is electrically identical to the MRF49XA.

Dual 900Mhz receivers for Vika 1 & Marcy 1.

Ancient 72Mhz converter from 3 years ago.

900Mhz converter fits inside the case.

Much better.

900Mhz converter has resistors for all the inputs to prevent overloading.The 900Mhz conversion runs at 9600bps. Manual control now has the full60Hz of the RC transmitter. It was reduced to 50Hz when it was 72Mhz.

After being plagued by broken wires & floating solder joints, the Marcy1 ground station was finally capable of flight.

Vika 1 is also beginning a long hard 900Mhz upgrade. Since the MRF49XAhas only a 16 bit buffer being consumed at 86000bps, getting VikaCopter to output data fast enough requires buffering an entire packet on the flight computer & sending it in 1 shot instead of sending data as it's collected.MICROMAG3 RIDES AGAINSince we didn't win the free $parkfun hibache knife set & no-one knowsif Marcy-1 will work, that leaves digging the old Micromag3 out of thegadget graveyard & fabricating a new Marcy-1 flight computerspecifically for it.A 3rd revision will be necessary. Depending on traffic, these boardscan be fabricated in 1 commute & since we're tax paying renters, thechips are fully recycled.

Spent $30 to find out only Mane Clog Remover, only at Walmart works.Other drain cleaners have additives which prevent the NaOH fromdissolving photoresist. Mind you, you're supposed to use batchpcb.

Etching skills are a bit rusty after the draino experiments.

Size comparison. Went back to single sided boards because they'relighter with our methods.

This one has a simple dipole with choke inductors, no decouplingcapacitors, 1 digital line under the chip & it still works. Filling aground patch & using 3 decoupling capacitors is only necessary formaximum range.

Suspect any inductors above 8nH would do the job but these were whatthe balun had.

Marcy 1 phase 2 with magnetometer grafted on.

& this is the raw & derivative of the magnetometer output at flight RPM. Flight RPM has 144 samples per period. The limiting factor is radio bandwidth, not the magnetometer. It takes 20000bps of radio bandwidth to downlink that. Monocopters take the zero crossings of the derivative to get azimuth & angular rate, but it's not so easy in realtime.
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Interesting Micro-UAVs

Posted by Christian Veyssiere on January 15, 2010 at 12:17am
Hi all,I'm a new members interesting by Micro-UAV since many years.If some ideas could interesting somebody, on my website, you could find some reports (made by me and my wife) of M-UAV contest from 2002 to 2008.For example :2007 at Toulouse (France)

2008 at Agra (India)

Actually, I'm working on FPV models and review of equipment.Yesterday, I have pilot the new Drone AR Parrot. Parrot society is in Paris and it was a fantastic experience.

12515-parrotardrone06.jpg

You could see pictures and video in a few time on the web site of this magazineByeChristian
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Introduction

Posted by Matt Johnston on January 14, 2010 at 7:44pm
Hi all,I'm a contracting WAN (large computer network) architect/engineer, and an embedded systems engineer (microprocessor-based stuff mainly, with most experience in netbook and mobile style applications). Before that I was a programmer, focusing on networked applications, and also did a while of AI development.I've been given a part-time funded project of the design of a mid-sized UAV (several to be built), for monitoring and on-demand surveillance of a medium sized property. Under the contract I have, I own all rights to the design, so I decided I'd share what I learn and develop with others.The planned UAV is a mid-sized quad-rotor helicopter, 500mm between rotor center and airframe center, with 200mm blades (for a 400mm rotor). These exact details may change however, and I'll try to keep this blog updated with progress and such.I'll be developing almost everything in-house, including the airframe, avionics, protocols, and ground station equipment. I'll be using pre-designed ICs, motors, and batteries (among other things) for obvious reasons. I'll be manufacturing a lot of the parts and assembly myself.The system is to be fully automated, and will be controlled via a base station server, with a small comms tower. The UAVs will contain mesh networking links, to allow either relayed communications with the base, or basic AI intelligence when they are outside of base range, by direct communication.I'll be posting to update on the sort of things I'm up to, and with more design and implementation details as they come up. I'll hope to follow this post soon with more information on how the system operates.Anyway, looks like a fun site, filled with a lot of knowledgeable people. I think I'm definitely going to enjoy my time here :)-Matt
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Developer

Ardupilot 2.5 Beta

Posted by Jason Short on January 14, 2010 at 5:00pm
This is a quick note to let everyone know that Ardupilot 2.5 is feature complete and can be downloaded via SVN. If you're on Windows, use TourtiseSVN and if you're on a OS X like me, try Versions. The code is located here.Once the Beta feedback is in I'll post a zip file of the final version. Information about using SVN can be found on the web. Please post any issues in this blog post, and I'll fix them immediately and re-upload.I'm also building a wiki manual to help with the configuration, but it's an early work in progress. I'll write a lot more this week, but there should be enough content up there to get you going.Use the Airframe tester to configure your new 2.5 header file and familiarize yourself with the startup sequence. Don't use the old 2.4 file, except to copy over your old gain settings. I've tried to keep as many of the values the same, but many values are new as well.By Default the control switch settings are 1 - manual, 2 - Autopilot, 3 - Stabilize. Feel free to change them to whatever you like.Good luck,Jasonp.s. Who thinks Ardupilot needs a logo?
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T3

GPS sats in view: quality does matter.

Posted by Krzysztof Bosak on January 14, 2010 at 2:00pm
Recently a flight in Norway revealed and interesting truth about GPS number of satellites in view: quantity is not quality. The photomission for T3-4 contest ended well, but the message is clear: checking wind is one thing, checking GPS availability is another.

T3-4 Photocontest using EasyUAV from brakar on Vimeo.

This thread explains things:http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?p=14059833#post14059833Compare how few satellites over the horison can fool navigating plane.

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3D Robotics

DIY Drones on Twitter

Posted by Chris Anderson on January 14, 2010 at 9:20am
DIY Drones is now fully Twitter-enabled! All blog posts are automatically tweeted on @DIYDrones, so please follow us there. Also, you can tweet any blog post or discussion forum post to your own Twitter account by clicking on the Twitter icon below it (circled below).

Finally, you can set your status update message on your MyPage to also post to your own Twitter account by checking the box shown below:

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3D Robotics

New site to buy AttoPilot and other UAV equipment--a work in progress

Posted by Chris Anderson on January 13, 2010 at 2:00pm

We love and worship AttoPilot, Dean Geodde and the smart team around him, but we're just thankful that they're better at UAVs than they are at the Web. The original attopilot.com website was a bit of a Flash disaster with a pdf order form and then was never updated. Now the site is down in the worst way: it's been showing a Godaddy landing page for the past couple weeks while Dean revamps the site (Dean, please! An "under construction" page is not that hard to put up!).

Fortunately, Chris McNair has taken on the web storefront role with a new site at http://www.emtechnologiesgroup.com/. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a Flash disaster, too. There are no links on the front page that will actually take you to any products, and the closest thing, "Product Brochure", weirdly gives you this:

However, if you click around enough you'll eventually find a "Purchase Here" link at the bottom of the page and that will take you to the storefront shown at the top of this page. It's all clearly a work in progress, and many of the images are missing or of the wrong thing (love the "Our Team" shot of clipart diversity!), so we can assume it will get better soon. Over at the Attopilot user group, Chris has asked for feedback and constructive criticism, so for starters may I suggest: 1) Kill the Flash. It's 2010--we all learned our lesson about Flash-based sites last decade. Just say no! 2) Put the product link on the home page 3) Put a redirect on attopilot.com or at least a page informing people that the company is still in business and to stay tuned for a new website. 4) Add community of some sort. Even a forum or discussion group would be better than nothing.
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Developer

Ublox operating, but won't get a fix - driving me crazy

Posted by Doug Weibel on January 13, 2010 at 11:39am
1 of my 2 Ublox modules has developed a problem. It refuses to get a fix. I am monitoring it with Ucenter and see that it is operating, it is tracking 7 or 8 satellited from inside my house, but it won't get a fix. I notice that it is getting the correct UTC time, but it cannot tell the date! I assume this is why it can't solve for a fix. I have reset the configuration and performed several cold starts. Not sure what else to try??? Any suggestions?
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