New Years day 2010 from Gary Mortimer on Vimeo.
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UAV flight: New Year's Day 2010 Wrocław, Poland from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.
New Year's Day seen from above.Unfortunately very dense fog, flight altitude 150m at the edge of visibility.Fully automatic amateur UAV custom-equipped with all necessary protections like automatic parachute etc.Total flight time around 30min.Due to very bad visibility had to tilt the camera down,causing missing most of the fireworks (they were all around), but thanks to look-down setup at least something was visible on the ground.Of course Sony Webbie is light but not a pro solution for shooting at midnight at 150m distances in dense fog.The colours are real, most of the city lighting is reddish.Temperature was around 0C, occasional freezing droplets of rain with snow (another reason to tilt the camera down, it landed with thin, shiny layer of ice on the wings).UAV returning from long range photomapping mission from Krzysztof Bosak on Vimeo.
I have attached an Excel sheet that I made with the equations needed to design a barometric altitude sensor.
For lower altitudes and for small altitude deltas, one can assume that there is a linear relationship between pressure and altitude. Please see the attached Excel sheet for more details.
The SCP1000 pressure sensor seems like a very good candidate for a pressure sensor:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8161
The manufacturer gives these data:
Resolution: 3 Pascal (the fineness to which the sensor can be read - nothing to do do with the accuracy)
Relative accuracy (how close to the real pressure the sensor measurements are) over temp range +10C to +40C and 600 hPa to 1200 hPa: +/- 50 Pa. (It is not given in the datasheet if this is sensor to sensor or for the same sensor)
The manufacturer does not give noise data. However sources on the Internet may indicate that the sensor has an inherent noise of +/- 50 Pa.
Datasheet: http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/SCP1000-D01.pdf
Sample code: http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Components/SCP1000-D01.pdf
Another guy using the sensor for a variometer for paragliding: http://www.pixelproc.net/varios.html
The noise may be filtered out using an averaging filter however. Even a kalman filter and two sensors may be used.
baro_height_measurement_unit.xls