The IMU Board has arrived. The stencil too! – This will be a fun process to get the parts soldered. I’ll keep you posted on how its going. I’ll try a few practice runs on some spare boards, and then we go for the gold!
IMU has arrived
August 5th, 2010
Pedal to the metal!
April 17th, 2010Well, the fixture for the motor controller is getting made. Its about half way through, but made lots of headway thanks to the help of Deno and Dan.
Here is a quick picture of burning metal, as Deno grinds down a bolt to size.
QuadHeli Block Diagram
April 10th, 2010I really need to beef up the documentation of the site, as well as organize it, so I figured I will at least post what I already have.
Here is the block diagram of the system.
Outline for QuadHeli project
Initially there will be four motors, but I intend to move up to 6 (and maybe 8 - who knows?). The system will be based off an embedded arm board, the TS-7500
http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7500#.
The motor controller will be designed with the intent of using serial or I2C communications, and I was intending to use serial (232) initally. The system would easily expand to 6 motors this way, since there are 3 free ones the way I currently have the design working.
The IMU would also connect via one of the serial ports, and the GPS would either be USB or 232.
Communication with the control system would be with a 801.11n wireless adapter (would give 1500ft line of sight range), and eventually also accept a standard R/C receiver as input.
Motor Test fixture
April 3rd, 2010To develop for the motors (the first section getting done), I need a stand. Also, to check for efficiency of the algorithm I’ll need a way to quantify the motor running. This will also allow me to try out different motors to find out a better one.
This is the awesome sketch Deno did for me of what the test stand will look like:
Awesome, isn’t it?
Potential AV circuit
April 1st, 2010Found this 5.8GHz receiver/transmitter pair that might work good for real time video:
http://www.iftrontech.com/p126/Nano-5.8GHz-100mw-AV-Transmitter/product_info.html