Modern technology can help to end a simple argument about matters like how high this ceiling:) If the ones that argue are Engineers then this has to be solved in a proper way. Well, how? Using a laser meter? Yikes! is this the best you come up with?  

Drones... Barometric Pressure... 3D printer... Drones... Barometric  Altimeter... Are you catching where I am going through? 

We have a lot of flying stuff at the office but Parrot Cargo Drone was the perfect choice for this mission. It has Lego connection points on and around of the drone. Then we needed a programmable lightweight and compact development board with an onboard barometric pressure sensor, a battery and a screen. watchX was way to go, it's small and totally eligible to fly. Parrot Cargo Drone is a small drone with a limited power. The overall solution that we mount on top of drone should be very lightweight! 

Then, we downloaded a Lego brick from GrabCad, we made a drawing based on the Lego brick connection. We made a two-part design to make printing process easy. 

The mechanic part was ready. To measure the height we need a firmware as well. watchX uses BMP280 barometric pressure sensor, the successor of BMP180. Adafruit has an excellent library for BMP280. We simply downloaded it and imported into Arduino IDE. To drive the OLED we also used Adafruit OLED library. Rest was easy. 

What the code basically does is that it shows current altitude and shows the total ascent. We needed one more thing. We need to subtract the base altitude where we will make the measurement. There is 3 tactile button on the watchX. We used one of them to take the altitude of the point where drone located and subtract it from the current altitude. 

Rest... Enjoy the video:)

It also doubles as a desktop watch:)

Hello Dear DIY DRONES Community. 

I am a long term fan of DIY DRONES and wanted pass on something new that could be a nice fit as a blog post. Me and my friend Enes(You can remember him from an excellent drawing of APM at GRABCAD)  working on UAVs for a long time now. Recently we come up with an idea of Arduino compatible wrist watch called watchX. it's an easy hackable development board that you can use in everyday life.

There are many usages of watchX besides being a daily watch. Initially, we wanted to have flight critic information on our wrist. Then, we removed the strap of watchX and designed a case to mount the PCB of the watch to Turnigy 9x. It was easy to draw a case since we are providing the 3D step model of watchX.  We needed a second board that communicates with the FPV Raptor via Mavlink and provide us the information like battery voltage, altitude, speed, current mode and artificial horizon. It still needs a lot of tuning and debugging. Please let us know what you think about it? 

Also currently we are running a crowdfunding Campaign on Indiegogo.

Hubsan announced it's new models for their mini quadcopter product range, one of them is H107D+. It's announced on January,however; it is not fully available neither online or on site, not even a curtain release date. Currently only a UK Company sells it online and on site. I got mine from their Peterborough store with price tag 169 GBP. 

Unlike H107D, D+ has a different control mechanism. Throttle stick is centered just like Aileron/Elevator stick. To fly it you first arm it with a stick configuration than you raise the Throttle more than %50 percent. As soon as you release the Throttle stick it tries to hold it's altitude. As an Engineer i could not stop my self to open and see the electronics inside. From the photos above it has a outstanding build quality. As you can guess barometric pressure sensor is covered with foam to read more accurate pressure sensing.

I had i couple of flights with it both indoors and outdoors. Battery lasts ~6 Min,which you charge it via usb on quad.It has a special battery and battery compartment, no more plugging cables. I like this compact military design. Indoor flights are not as perfect as 107D or X4 because alt. hold mode can't hold the altitude rock steady, it oscillates within 20cm up and down at a low frequency to manage it's altitude . On outdoors, it's much more stable and fun to fly. Video feed range is very good, it can hover in a point where you can barely see it without loosing transmission. 

You can start stop video recording and take photos from TX. Video quality is good day/night (with 720P resolution).My overall opinion on D+ is it requires firmware update to fly much more stable and solve rare bugs, i hope that usb connector build this in mind.

Hi Diydrones Community,

We just started to develop flight monitoring app for smart watches, We are aiming to have important features like when battery is critic watch will vibrate and warn the user, on the other hand drone pilots can voice command to change flight modes over watch(this will be hard to develop, we will do our best). Of course flight critical information can be also monitored on the watch. 

We will add artificial horizon, however; this may not be useful since we can see the artificial horizon over phone, may be drone pilots wants this as a dedicated artificial horizon. We will also include a professional compass, barometer, and altimeter functions.

Currently we already developed a free app called CompassX for android wear smart watches, i think it will be very handy at the field for now. Let us know what you think and what you want?

Thanks.

I just saw on the youtube that Trent has canceled the USA Trip, after a tip stall and bad crash. For me this can show and teach many things who are out there and see this as a simple job to do. When people see a UAS flying, they think they can start a business easily out of it or start flying like a pro. 

When you start flying constantly and frequently, problems start to appear and this is a great example. For me it was a big attempt and a good lecture. I appreciate Trent for his afford and his attempt. I encourage  him to start a blog post about the problems he had and lectures he had taken. Good job Trent. 

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration today announced that it has given approval for the first commercial drone flights over land. Energy corporation BP and unmanned aircraft systems manufacturer AeroVironment will now be able to legally fly a drone for aerial surveys over BP’s Prudhoe Bay oil field on Alaska’s North Slope.

Here is the rest of the news: http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/10/faa-approves-first-commercial-drone-flights-over-land/

According to news Nasa is releasing the source code of more than 1000 software "The software that the agency has developed over years cover things like image processing, robotics, data processing, and design tools amongst other things.". I think those softwares belongs to old Apollo, Mercury or Gemini missions. It would be very cool to see the code of P61(program 61 used to land the lunar module to the surface of the moon). 

We can also grab a lot of useful piece of code for our APM or Pixhawk firmware.