Moderator Comment by Sgt Ric on December 25, 2008 at 9:10am

Read some of the project blogs and you will see this is an area which has been covered in depth.

Comment by Venom57 on December 25, 2008 at 9:14am

Thanks, but have then been added to the ArduPilot?

Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on December 25, 2008 at 2:54pm

No, ArduPilot does not use an IMU. It's based on thermopiles (IR sensors). There are other Arduino projects that do use IMUs, however, so if you search around you'll see plenty to play with. Not as easy as "2 sensors from SparkFun", you'll discover.

Comment by Venom57 on December 26, 2008 at 6:08am

Sorry, I should have been more clear in my response. I would like to add an IMU and pressure sensors to the Ardupilot and modify the code to support it. From what I see there looks to be a few unused analog and digital pins. As for the "hooking it up" I've got that part covered. As for making it fit in the 14K available, I'll probably have to use a 328.

I was just looking over the Altitude algorithm in ArduPilot and I'd really like to control my throttle based altitude algorithm based on the current pitch, airspeed and possibly altitude from known launch site. Right now it looks like it will peg to 100% throttle in 10 cycles. I would prefer to detect pitch and if we are headed up and airspeed still looks good keep the throttle constant.

I've also been kicking around the idea of loading DTED data onto a Beagle board and using that to drive some of the decisions about altitude.

Comment by Venom57 on December 26, 2008 at 6:27am

This type of modification to the basic ArduPilot system is exactly why I'm so interested in getting it in revision control. I'd love to see many folks working on their own variants and subsequent versions incorporating any great ideas that others have.

Moderator Comment by Chris Anderson on December 26, 2008 at 9:04am

We'll have it in SourceForge by the end of the week. Those modifications sound great--go for it!

Comment by Venom57 on December 26, 2008 at 9:08am

Great! It looks like you've got things under control but if you need or want anyone to help, I'm available.

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