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DeveloperPermalink Reply by Pete Hollands on September 23, 2009 at 12:59am

Daniel,

Explorers may not know the length of their journey until they have completed it - and then made a map for others to follow.

A year ago, I started looking at autopilots. Having worked with Unix and then Linux over 20 years, I was drawn to Paparazzi which installs on my Ubuntu laptop in just a couple of minutes. It is an impressive design and implementation. (I wish that they had stayed with standard languages and did'nt add the OCAML language). But I wanted the IMU piece - and most people at that time were using Infrared sensors on Paparazzi.

With some research it became clear that William Premerlani was the explorer and cartographer. He has openly coded, and written up the Mathematics, and then the "HOW Tos". And when you start to read his work, it is a deep subject requiring a variety of skills. Not only Maths (which is deep), but good understanding of interrupt driven micro-controllers, accelerometers, gyros, and electronic design. Overlayed on this is a careful risk minimisation strategy and attention to safety. That means careful C coding - and slowly but surely, and iteratively growing the design to the point where his UAV-DEVBOARD is now capable of using waypoints.

My suggestion is that you need to understand the size of the knowledge set here. I now beleive that I have a much better understanding than a year ago. And that has been done by reading and reading. But reading is usually not enough. One has has to "do". So I have purchased a Red UAV Devboard, and am installing in a Multiplex Twinstar 2.

My view would be that you gain an idea of what is involved, reading all the documentation for the Red Board.

Good luck with the learning journey.

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