Last Saturday I attended Barcamp Antwerp in Belgium. The idea of a barcamp is that every attendee gives a presentation without to much preparation. I talked about my autopilot project.



The presentation got featured on Slideshare, you can see it here:… Continue

Today my autopilot hardware took the sky for the first time. Although this maiden flight was successful, its only a first step.

The primary goal of the test was to see if the autopilot failsafe mechanisms operated fine:

- no lockup on division by zero

- instant regain of control after brown-out causing reboot

- no lock on uncaught interrupts

- handover to servo failsafe positions on RC reception lost

- instant… Continue

I have been working on/off on an autopilot to use in RC airplanes. The goal is to fully automatically take pictures of an object like a house, construction site, etc.



I made the hardware in last year's Christmas holiday. During the year I spend a few hours writing the embedded software for it (in C, works much faster then assembly).



The hardware is super low cost: The PIC dsPIC30f4012 is very cheap and still has enough memory and speed (30 MIPS) to be self sufficient… Continue