Moderator Comment by Krzysztof Bosak on April 2, 2010 at 6:29am

I see serious effort to make the installation tidy.
Reminds me early trials with Flexipilot:

Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on April 2, 2010 at 8:54am

Very nice! Much neater than anything I've ever done.

Where did you get that round enclosure for the thermopiles?

Could you replace all the Eagletree gear (including the redundant GPS) with Xbee telemetry from ArduPilot and just datalog from ground?

Comment by Matias Rajkay on April 2, 2010 at 9:25am

Hi Chris,
the thermopile enclosure is made fro a piece of cardboard tube. On top of it sits half of an empty scotchtape reel (both covered under black tape). The "golden" cap is a part cut from a small spraycan cap (If I remember well, it was a small can of color protection spray for inkjet prints). In other words - just stuff laying around in the workshop....

The data could also be logged on the ground with an Xbee (unfortunately I don't have one) - however, with telemetry - according to my experience (I do have the eagletree telemetry stuff) - you will always have some glitches. The on-board datalogger will deliver a more complete data set. Also, the EagleTree can record more parameters than the Ardupilot is tracing. In my set-up, the logger is configured to log all servo pulses (so I can check what Ardupilot is doing), barometric altitude, airspeed (form the pitot tube), all GPS data and the Rx voltage. By simply plugging in sensors, I could add motor current & voltage, temperatures, acceleration in two axes etc. Telemetry, on the other hand, lets you look at live data...

Comment by Dan Smithson on April 2, 2010 at 9:36am

Great idea with the canopy location...very neat....

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