Phil Pilgrim posted an awesome project to the Object Exchange. It emulates the functionality of Bell 202 modems using software, and a few external components. It allows you to output a Frequency Shit Keying audio signal into a transceiver. AFSK only runs at 1200 bps, so it won't be fast enough to control a UAV by hand, but it may allow you to recover from a situation where your object has traveled beyond the range of your high-speed link. Also, since you can use 1200 baud AFSK on relatively… Continue

For Propeller users out there, I recently posted a new IMU object to the Prop forum:



Functionally, it is pretty much the same as the one we've been using. Still uses a SparkFun 5DF IMU board, and MCP3208 ADC. But I translated the original code to assembly, and freed up a cog.



Now it runs at ~2700 Hz (unnecessarily fast, but that is what it is doing)

Only uses two cogs. One for reading the MCP3208, and another for IMU/Kalman filtering.

Loads from just one .spin… Continue

Google Earth can be controlled by AppleScript (on Macs, Windows probably has similar options). I took a couple of projects I've been working on, and came up with a cool little real-time google earth tracker.



Equipment:



Prop protoboard

GPS

5 degree of freedom board from Sparkfun

XBee 900 100 mW modules



On the computer I have a cocoa app monitoring the XBee over a serial line, and parsing the strings coming over it. Through AppleScript, the cocoa… Continue