All Posts (14039)
Sort by
- Lesson 1: Little blimps need still air
- Lesson 2: If you can't find still air, you need WAY more powerful thrusters (which means more battery power, which means more weight, which probably means a bigger blimp)
- Lesson 3: Don't update your firmware five minutes before you're going to fly an autonomous robot ten feet away from a former Vice President of the United States.
- Lesson 4: Hey, it's a tech demo on stage, and they *always* go wrong--don't let it throw you. So I didn't. I just stood there holding the blimp, as you can see in the picture above, and went on with my talk and slides as planned. Points made, time limit met, applause gained. I looked a bit awkward, I'm sure (although hopefully not always as unhappy as I look above), but at least I got the sympathy vote! Now on to San Diego for Etech on Tuesday, where we get to do it again for an hour in front of the smartest geeks in the world. So much for the sympathy vote ;-) Jordi's hard at work fixing the firmware problems, so fingers crossed...
- It's a "development platform", not a fully-featured working autopilot. Although there is firmware available for it, it's designed to be a standard hardware package around which you can develop your own autopilot code.
- The firmware comes pre-loaded, and works pretty much as advertised. I tested it on the ground, so it was hard to tell how well it actually stabilizes a plane, but the elevator seemed to respond properly to tilting. The rudder didn't, but that was probably because it was trying to turn the "plane" to a destination and I wasn't playing along ;-)
- That firmware is written in assembly, so good luck to you! It seems to do pretty much the basics of what you'd want an autopilot to do (and I mean basics--there's no provision for waypoints, and it's just a "fly home" autopilot at the moment), but if you want to tweak it you'll have to do learn PIC assembly (not super hard, but still: what's wrong with C?!)
- It includes a 4-degree-of-freedom IMU: two gyros and one two-axis accelerometer.
- As the two-axis configuration suggests, it's designed to control just two channels: elevator and rudder. A third channel is used to turn it on and off.
- It's got a good SiRF III GPS module on board, although you'll need to add your own antenna through the included SMA connector.
- At $299, it's not cheap. But when you consider that a simple set of accelerometers and gyros will set you back $109, the addition of GPS and a PIC processor, all nicely integrated on a board, is probably worth it. But it still seems about $100 overpriced to me.
- You need some additional hardware to work with it: the main thing is an ICD2 interface to program the onboard PIC chip and for debugging. That will set you back another $120.
- The documentation looks excellent, with a lot of theory on control and aerodynamics as well as a lot of help on PIC assembly language and development suggestions for the platform.
- Bottom line: this looks like a good, albeit expensive, way to learn about IMU-based autopilots. It's not really an autopilot itself yet, but could be made into a relatively low-featured one pretty easily. I think it's accurately described as a "development platform", so if you're in the market for that and can afford a $300 lesson, I can recommend it as a unique and well-made way to get started.