Replies to This Discussion

DeveloperPermalink Reply by William Premerlani on July 17, 2009 at 11:16am

Hugues,

There are two solutions that I would recommend that you could use with limited programming skills.

One is Jordi and Chris's ArduPilot. It is an autopilot with a very nice ground station that you can use to receive and display flight data.

Another one is my UAV DevBoard. I use it for thermal flying to stabilize my sailplane, to return it to me if it gets too far away.

There are tabs at the top of the main page that you can open to get more information about either of these approaches.

There are plenty of other solutions as well, take a look around this website.

Best regards,
Bill Premerlani

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Permalink Reply by Peter Meister on July 17, 2009 at 12:32pm

Bill,

Does the UAV Devboard support Xbee Telemetry ? Out of the box ?

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by William Premerlani on July 17, 2009 at 1:00pm

Peter,

The UAV Devboard does not support Xbee Telemetry out of the box. However, there is a spare serial port on the port, so a do-it-yourselfer could interface to Xbee.

Even without telemetry, the Devboard does make themaling more secure and fun. The return to launch feature prevents you from losing your plane, and the IMU based stabilization makes it easier to maintain level flight without seeing the attitude of your aircraft.

I think that Hugues would enjoy either the ArduPilot or the Devboard.

Bill

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Permalink Reply by Peter Meister on July 17, 2009 at 2:00pm

Yes Bill, your project is most impressive to me. I have worked on the ardupilot, and I will continue too. But I think I am going to move forward on the UAV Devboard side. I like the fact that the gyros are there with full IMU. No need for thermopiles, and all the extra stuff. Keeps weight down, I know there are threads on waypoint possibilities, I may develop towards that. As well since there is a serial there, I may start developing an XBee interface to it so that data from the GPS can be sent to a ground station.

Aileron Assist is awesome, I have the board and have used it. Very easy to setup and get operational, which is why I wish there was more deeper development done on this board as well, similar to what has been done on ardupilot. But I will attempt to add some modules to it going forward and submit them up to the community here.

Thanks for the great work you did in bring this to life.

-Peter

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by William Premerlani on July 17, 2009 at 4:03pm

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your kind words. I am glad that you enjoyed AileronAssist.

My main interest is in stabilization and return to launch rather than autopilots. I like the idea of mostly doing the flying myself, with an onboard computer to make the flying easier and more fun. "Out of the box", my firmware is really best suited to help beginning fliers and sailplane pilots.

When I started out in this hobby, my motives really were to develop something for my own personal use only. SparkFun convinced me to let them sell my board, and let the rest of the world look over my shoulder. That has worked out rather well. SparkFun manufactures the boards and gets the money, I get to meet a lot of interesting people and exchange ideas.

In addition to beginning fliers and sailplane pilots, I thought my board would be of interest to the do-it-yourselfer. I figured that if I provided much of the needed infrastructure such as attitude computations, PWM I/O, and GPS message parsing, that pilots such as yourself would enjoy building what they wanted.

I am always interested in extensions to, and unusual applications of, my board, such as stabilization of a fishing boat, and instrumentation of a motorcycle. I like to help people who are extending the firmware, or even porting it to their own hardware, or even copying my hardware. "Its all good" as far as I am concerned.

Best regards,
Bill

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Permalink Reply by Peter Meister on July 18, 2009 at 10:10am

Yes, I use it for FPV flight with Video, It allows me to take HD video and High Definition Still photography amazingly stable. So for Aerial Photography and Flight by video this unit is no doubt the best and most economical on the market. As a sailplane pilot as well, I find it awesome for getting into thermals and maintaining climb and performance. It really makes it easy to get long flights off your glider :)

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Permalink Reply by UFO-MAN on July 19, 2009 at 2:24pm

Hi, I am working on telemetry for Bills green (and red) boards, just so you know. Will post more info when I have something up and running.

UFO_MAN

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ModeratorPermalink Reply by Krzysztof Bosak on July 17, 2009 at 2:31pm

The best solution would be fitting FMA copilot.
Supposing that you will be able to control the glider manually by looking at artificial horison doesn't accounts the control lag. Remember, any autopilot with long range telemetry will need power-hungry TX. Telemetry would be a massive overkill and at the end underperforming vs simple FMA.

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by William Premerlani on July 17, 2009 at 2:57pm

Krzysztof,

I agree with your reasoning about not trying to do remote piloting with telemetry.

I also agree that an FMA copilot is good, but I am not sure that its the only solution. The UAV DevBoard is pretty good too, and offers the following advantages:

Provides return-to-launch capability.
Small, lightweight, with no infrared sensors that need to be mounted outside of the plane.
Stabilized by accelerometers and gyros.
Detects loss of transmitter signal and returns to launch.

I have used the UAV DevBoard, and its previous versions, for over 5 years worth of sailplane flying to push it to the limits. One time I was at a park, a couple of large dogs started interfering with me. I simply shut off my transmitter and let my sailplane circle overhead while the owner of the dogs came and fetched them.

Best regards,
Bill

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Permalink Reply by Hugues Laliberte on July 17, 2009 at 11:36pm

Hi guys,

thanks for the good discussion here, i now know better what the options are.

My original idea was to downlink the atitude data from my glider and use it to activate some tiny actuators located on the skin of my arms under a band. You would have one actuator for the nose of the plane, one for the tail, two for the tips of the wings, and maybe a middle one conveying sink/lift rate. So let's say your plane is banking to the right, then the right actuator would put a slight pressure down on your skin. I think this way after getting used to it, you would develop some kind of 6th (or is it 7th) sense on the atitude of your plane, without actually seeing it. You would still keep your eyes on the plane just to be sure it's flying in the right direction., which is good, i don't really like the idea of watching a screen while flying.

I don't want a full auto-pilot either. I enjoy flying and staying in a good thermal on my own, it's just sometimes the glider is so high that you can't judge too well the atitude.

So i think im gonna go the UAV DevBoard way and start "simple" with flight stabilization. The return to launch feature is also great. Does it "simply" bring your glider back overhead, or also brings it down in altitude ?

I will read more in the UAV DevBoard section

thanks a lot,

Hugues
from Switzerland

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by William Premerlani on July 18, 2009 at 9:00am

Hugues,

To answer your question about return to launch (RTL) ...

The RTL feature brings your glider back to the return to launch point, and then it circles. The pitch behavior during RTL depends on a parameter that you can set that is a change in pitch angle during RTL. If you set the parameter to zero, then the plane circles overhead with whatever pitch trim that you set, which you can continue to adjust from your transmitter during RTL.

If you set the parameter to a value, the plane will pitch downward during RTL by whatever value you set. The idea is that you can use this feature to help you get your plane back with RTL if it got too far downwind, and you are willing to trade off some altitude to penetrate the wind. In any case, you can continue to adjust pitch trim from your transmitter in RTL mode, unless your transmitter is off. The firmware continually analyzes the pulses coming from the radio. If your plane is getting out of range of your transmitter, or if you shut your transmitter off, the controls will do their best to get your plane back to you.

If there are good thermals and/or slope lift, your plane may continue to gain altitude in RTL mode. I was flying with my son today, that was the situation we got into. There was an "elevator in the sky". Our sailplane wound up high into a cloud. Disappeared entirely from our sight. So we set it for RTL and adjusted the pitch trim down a bit until the plane popped out the bottom of the cloud.

Best regards,
Bill

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ModeratorPermalink Reply by Krzysztof Bosak on July 18, 2009 at 9:39am

For return home, there is RVOSD solution. No need to use its OSD capabilities. Just for completness.

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