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Newbie challenge: high altitude drop
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Newbie challenge: high altitude drop
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Profile
- About Me:
- I'm Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine, author of The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2006) and editor of GeekDad.com
- Website:
- http://longtail.com
- Hometown:
- Berkeley, California
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Chris Anderson's Blog
SMD BlimpDuino board, assembled
New Lego Mindstorms NXT servo controller board
As cool as our Lego Mindstorms… Continue
Posted on July 4th, 2008 at 4:30pm —
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Stanford quadcopters rock!
We've enjoyed watching the development of Stanford's…
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Posted on July 3rd, 2008 at 1:00pm —
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UAV videos on Engineering TV
Engineering TV has a bunch of UAV episodes up, including the Berkeley Aerobot Team and the Hybrid Systems Lab a…
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Posted on June 30th, 2008 at 6:24pm —
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Our next ArduPilot: the dual-core ArduPilot Pro!
Posted on June 28th, 2008 at 8:00pm —
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Some time ago Jordi started work on ArduCopter, which can be found on the arduino site (google "ArduCopter") but it not yet flying and there is no board and no recent progress.
I don't believe that any low-cost function open-source helicopter autopilot exists, but the Paparazzi (which can handle quadcopters) comes closest. Check them out and see if that meets your needs.
i am interested in building a robotic surveillance helicopter with an endurance of 2 hr and covering a range of min 40 km.I am using a Baron helicopter.Could you tell me sources for autopilot system and video camera system (good but cheap ones).
Thank you
Been following along for some time (geekdad) and just bought a Blubberbot for something to do over the summer holidays... thinking about the project possibilities for my kids in electronics 11/12 ... hmmm blimp racing? Anyway, great to be here.
I won honorable mention, best in category, best in engineering, 550$, and an internship offer, at the state science & engineering fair. (The winners were a guy who did computer simulations of bird flu epidemics to determine the best method to distribute a limited supply of antivirals, a girl who developed an advanced, complex robotic vision algorithm which could detect blobs in foggy areas and high altitude ranges, and a guy who figured out a method to stem the growth of certain forms of cancer, so it was a humbling experience).
I just wanted to thank you for making this website and for your great documention and projects, because without them I'd probably still be trying to figure out how to connect the GPS receiver to the Stamp.
Thanks!
- Simon
By the way, thanks for the advice about starting out in R/C with a foamie...else I would not have made it past my first flight attempts.
elisa
If you want to do a Q&A with me, that would be fine.
The reason for the board is that my son and I thought it would be fun to build our own board, develop theory, and write firmware. We were inspired by Maynard Hill, who came to town and gave a talk.
We got our feet wet with a rapid-prototyping board mounted on an RC truck, and then build our own board for a sailplane. We bought our parts from SparkFun. Nathan Seidle, the ownder of Sparkfun, asked me what we were doing, I told him, he offered to build a surface mount board for me.
My son and I spent a few delightful summers getting the firmware working. At the time, our goal was to play, to just do some interesting things with it, without any goal in mind. When we were done, we had something that worked to our satisfaction, Nathan asked if he could sell it, we gave him permission.
We recognized that what we had was not a full-fletched autopilot, but that it might be interesting to anyone wanting to tinker with the controller. They could build on our firmware, if they wanted, or start from stratch, if they were ambitious.
By the way, the main reason we used assembly language was that my son had never written any, and he wanted to learn. He had used lots of other languages, but not assembly.
As far as what people are doing with my board, you probably have more information than I have!! The only person I've talked to so far is a member of diydrones. All I know is that the board is selling well at SparkFun, with no complaints.
By the way, the reason the board has been backordered for so long is that the vendor of the GPS replaced their ET301 with an ET312 at the same time that SparkFun was automating their board production, resulting in some defective boards. Even after we worked out the hardware problems, there was a subtle change in the ET312 that caused some problems. Every board that SparkFun builds is tested with the full firmware running, and the boards were not passing. We finally figured out what was wrong, production is resumed, I guess they are catching up on backorders.
All of the work my son and I was deliberately done in a vacuum...we didn't do any research on what other people were doing. We made some mistakes (that was the point) and had some fun.
My background is an electrical engineer with strengths in control theory, mathematics, and theory of flight.
I work at GE's research labs, I've been there for 33 years.
You might want to do a Google on "William Premerlani" to see what I have been up to. Much of it has to do with software development...you gave me a good chuckle when you said in your review that you wondered why we hadn't used C...the answer is, it would have been too easy!!!
Bill
We're *DIY* Drones--buying one premade isn't the point ;-)
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