I have been a fan of Björn's Lighthouse missions every since his very first one almost 5 years ago!

This year he replaced his stable plane with a fast funjet. And a gluonpilot in it! The fastest lighthouse mission so far, the best images so far, and the first with take-off and landing on autopilot.

A big applause for Björn!

Enjoy his beautiful video (enable 720p/HD):

A small note on the upcoming 0.8 release: The beta's keep coming, but there's one reason for this: BAD WEATHER! I managed to do 3 testflights in the last 4 weeks. It just keeps raining... But it is nearly finished, and there will be a LOT of new features in it!

  Seit kurzem habe ich ein MacBook Pro mit OS X Lion 10.7. Ich muss zugeben, der Umstieg von meinem alten MacBook auf das aktuelle Pro-Modell viel mir nicht sonderlich schwer. Leider bringt neue Hard- und Software immer neue Probleme mit sich. Auch hier kam nach kurzer Nutzung schon das erste Problem auf: OS X [...]

after traveling the world for quite some time I had to replace some hardware - so I decided to take a paid job in Berlin at EyeEm this year. The team is nice and multinational. Most conversations are in English. But there was a downside: I had to fix bugs all the day - the guy working on the code before is a very good coder, but was in a hurry with a lot of tasks ( back-end,tech-lead and the android client) Fixing bugs is OK for a while, but I need creative coding to stay happy..
I have one very important motto in life "Love it, Change it or leave it" - in this case I selected [x]change and convinced the founders to let me do a small side project for the company in 20% of my work time. And this is a message to all the people saying "Oh my company has no 20% project" - just ask them - the worst they can say is "no"
So what is it? In buzz words: EyeEmTV is one hyper-local, inter-connected and soon intelligent personalizable picture display for Android devices with focus on big screen devices like Tablets or now especially Google TV.


That means it can continuous play photos which are relevant to the audience and also the position and time of the playback. It is designed to require minimal interaction - just run in the background and show relevant photos with some Meta information ( if the user wants it - user is able to switched off nearly all elements - so that the Picture is the only thing seen ). In most cases we can add the meta-information without making the Image smaller as a lot of pictures are like 4:3 and the TV 16:9. Another Design decision is that the most recent images are preferred. That means if you shoot an image that belongs to the selected album -> your image will be the next to be displayed. There is not much user-interaction, but there is the option to display a BarCode with every Image which users can scan and then interact with the image ( like,comment,..) with an app on their own device.

• At home playing a stream of photos from family/friends
• At office playing a stream of photos from the Team members
• At events playing a stream of photos via big screen or beamer of pictures shoot at the event.

Çan also be used as a form of visual communication. Sometimes taking a picture is faster than writing what you are up to or where you are.

EyeEmTV is using our official API which was released not long ago. The APP is not yet released ( you can ask me for an beta-APK ) but it will be released this month to the Android Market and ( which makes me very happy ) the code to GitHub!
Next step in bringing a fresh wind into the company is to equip the office with a table football. It could replace the - for communication so important - but because of biological reasons not happening anymore  - cigarette breaks . Beside that - every cool start up has something like that ..

I've made this video some weeks ago, but being buried deep into the documention almost nobody watched it. To get some more attention, here it is :-)

Any cool other stuff you'd like to see: just let me know!!!

The latest development code (due in release 0.8) contains a lot of new features!

In my opinion, the simulation (hardware-in-the-loop) is the most exciting one. It allows you to test out all kinds of navigation routines without having to test them out at the field. AND it allows me to develop new navigation stuff without having to do a lot of flight testing before getting it right. All this is very easy in the current autumn days with very little flying opportunities.

This picture explains how it all works:

Actually there aren't a lot more screen shots to show: from the Gluon Control Station it looks as if it is a real flight :-)

More documentation on the simulation page.

Das erfolgreiche Landkamp wird fortgesetzt:

Das Landkamp 3.12 findet erneut in Ostheim an der Rhön statt - und zwar vom 17.05. - 20.05.2012. Zu dem Treffen sind alle Kopterbegeisterten und solche, die es werden wollen, eingeladen!

Eine Beschreibung, was Euch dort erwartet,  sowie die Anmeldeliste und aktuelle Infos sind unter www.landkamp.de zu finden.

If you are planning to visit the 28C3 as last year some of us are there. This time though we have a dedicated table on the upper floor, and should be easier to find. We will be very happy if you come by and say hi!

Great interview with Martin Müller on Chaos Radio Express 187. Discussing the history and the inner workings of Paparazzi. Enjoy!

It's winter again and I did not update my blog for half a year. Evil me. Let's change this...

Let me start with this summer's CCC Camp, which was a great event and everybody who joined us in the UAVP-Village in Finowfurth had a lot of fun. If you head over here, then you will find some pictures of the event.

After the camp we had a nasty surprise, when we found out that our new hardware HW-0.22-mini-r2 of the Mini-NG had a non recoverable bug on the PCB. It was nobody's fault in special, we all should have take more care in checking the changes, which have been done. To make up to our users, who already got a revision 2 board, we replaced them for free with a HW-0.22-mini-r3 board, produced immediately after we found out about the bug.

The new HW-0.22-mini-r3 of the Mini-NG performs admirably and many of us are now flying these boards, which offer exactly the same features as the big HW-0.22 tower, except that it's only one board with 55x55mm.

In the meantime we also developed new features for NGOS. Having received my new ACT 2.4GHz Kit with Diversity on both sender and receiver side together with telemetry, we decided that it would be time to support the telemetry system from ACT (M-Bus) and Multiplex (M-Link). Both systems are essentially identical. The new NGOS supports up to 14 different on-board values to be transmited on the back channel to the sender. The user is free to define which of the 14 slots should transmit which on-board data. A ACT UDP or a Multiplex sender is able to show these slots on his display to the pilot. Documentation and configuration examples can be found here, in the extensive NGOS documentation.

Having completed my new Mini-NG with all sensors, including GPS and compass, I decided to give Position Hold, Coming Home and Waypoint flying a bit of priority.

Having already completed the new NGCTRL2 communication protocol in summer, I decided to give Qngctrl a update and visualize all the new navigation stuff using the new features of NGCTRL2.

NGCTRL2 is a framed packet based communication protocol, where each packet may contain an arbitrary amount of data-sets which in turn each contain a type and a payload. The packet content is encoded with the COBS (Constant Overhead Byte Stuffing) algorithm making sure we only use up 1 byte in 256 for byte stuffing (worst case) which in turn makes sure we can always detect our framing byte and also assures, that we may use all possible byte values inside the packet. The COBS encoded packet content then gets a XOR checksum and a framing byte at the end and is sent over the unsecured serial connection.

Each of the NGCTRL2 data-set packed into a packet contain a type value, describing the payload type and it's implicit length. libng, our PC client library for NGOS communication has a poll() API allowing client applications to easily receive and parse the NGCTRL2 packets. As each data-set contains a type field, a client can request arbitrary dump intervals for each data-set type. A NGOS is even able to send data-sets which were not even requested by a client, thus allowing NGOS to inform a client of events happening on the copter side.

I've implemented waypoint flying on the NGOS side by giving NGOS a new waypoint table, which describes the coordinates of the available waypoints. The table can be manipulated with the normal "show" and "set" commands in the NGOS shells. There is a new suite of shell commands starting which the keyword "nav", allowing the user to issue navigational commands like "nav position-hold" or "nav fly-waypoint-fdw". The amir-ng controller was changed to understands the concepts of target, waypoint and it's navigation algorithms were adapted to be able to fly with different behaviors. Each waypoint is defined by it's coordinates, a dwell time and a action and argument, which will allow for a lot of new cool features in the future. At the moment, we only know two actions called "reach, next" and "reach, dwell, next". More actions are to be expected.

On the client side I implemented a new GPS Map view, which visualizes all navigational information received from a NGOS and displays it's position, it's target, it's waypoints as well as all navigational data needed to calculate the curse, consisting of target deviation and target distance. A nice small navigational control shows the headings of the different target/waypoints/home positions and also shows the result of the navigation algorithm for debugging purposes.

This is the above mentioned GPS Map. At that moment it shows a NG flying in a simulated flight using real GPS data and currently doing waypoint flying forward with 5 waypoints currently heading towards the first of them:

As you can see the GUI not only shows multiple waypoints and targets but also many of the on-board states like the battery voltage and the controller flight state. These get transmitted to the client whenever they change. Altitude Height controls are missing yet and will be implemented soon.

In the meantime our hardware developers were busy too and they redesigned the Mini-NG in HW-0.23-mini-r0. The new prototype will use the MPU6050 3D acc and gyro sensors and features an on-board GPS. First prototypes have been built and we hope to bring some of them to 28C3.

Last but not least work on our next-generation hardware platform HW-0.30 has begun. It will feature 2 STM32 CPUs with single precision FPU running at 168MHz combined with a dual-port RAM for fast direct memory communication. We hope to port NGOS to the STM32 architecture during summer 2012 and so support multiple architectures within one source code.

Currently everybody is preparing and packing for the 28C3, this years Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin where we will participate as every year.

On the 28C3 we plan to work on the NGOS software for the upcoming HW-0.23-mini release. Also we plan to further develop HW-0.30. Everybody interested in our project is invited to visit us at 28C3.

Besides our new hardware revisions, some developers are currently working on new brushless-controllers, a controller for lights called NGlight and other fun projects. We're looking forward to discuss, improve upon and show prototypes of them on 28C3.

28C3, we're incoming... ;)

The auto-throttle feature makes it really easy to test the maximum flight time of you UAV. In the upcoming new release, a "Battery alarm" feature will be available too. This will allow you to configure "warning-levels" and "panic-levels". When, the panel level is reached, the autopilot automatically jumps to a configured navigation line (landing in my case). Very safe and easy!

My old funjet managed to fly 33minutes before deciding to land. A new wing that I'm building should fly at least 45minutes! Can't wait until the build is finished :-)

A video of the automatic spot landing of yesterday's endurance flight:

Somebody asked if I could shoot a video of the gluonpilot auto takeoff and landing. As you can see, I still have a lot to learn about video tutorials. I even failed at getting a nice video of the automatic landing :-) It's hard to aim on a small plane in the air!

The result is a video of the gluonpilot taking off automatically after an awful throw. After that some basic explanations on how I prepare for auto-landing:

A new release for gluonpilot!

Short overview:

1. New and prettier waypoint icons!

2. Minimum and maximum pitch angle can now be defined separately:

This has several advantages:

• We can climb faster (especially important during takeoff)
• We can descent more gentle

The recommanded settings are the one from the screenshot. This mean the new firmware has additional configuration settings. Please save your current configuration to file before upgrading to the latest firmware.

3. Improved auto landing! The auto-landing is now completely automated!

Right now you have 2 options for autolanding (see Helpers -> Add block)

• manual-land: This will give you a "Descent" and a "Flare" button. Descent will fly along the defined circle to loose altitude. When the plane is heading in the right direction, and the altitude is fine too, you can press "Flare" and the plane will fly in the direction of the Flare waypoint. Motor will be turned off
• auto-land: The autopilot will automatically glide towards the Flare waypoint when the altitude and heading is correct!

These 2 options are not recommended when you have a plane with a really good glide angle. In this case it will need a long distance to reach to ground. Experimentation is key here! There are 2 options:

• FLARE_TO: perfect for deltas and flying wings. The target altitude (e.g. 15 meter) will try to be reached without any motor running! This will result in a pancake-like landing.
• GLIDE_TO: The autopilot will try to follow the altitude line between the Descent-circle and the Flare-waypoint. Be carefull of steep descents & hard landings!

It should be noted that before or after take-off, you will need to move the Descent-circle and Flare-waypoint to make sure you will flare with head wind.

4. Wind vane

Thanks to the work of the folks at gentlenav/matrixpilot it has become possible to calculate wind without hard calculations! Now included in Gluon Control Station!

5. New settings:

• Default altitude for new waypoint
• Default circle radius for new circles
• Custom UAV name

New firmware and install file can be downloaded in the download section!

Alex from UnmannedTech has a lot more writing-skills than I do, and he has put this talent to a use to write a tutorial on the Gluonpilot kits he also sells.

The first episode is about soldering and wiring everything up, and his next eposide will cover the configuration part.

Thumbs up for Alex!

Habe mein altes MTB zum Pedelec umgebaut.

Ich verwendete dazu einen Umbausatz der Firma RTEC

Einbau der neuen Hinterrades mit einem 7fach Schraubkranz

Fertiger Umbau des MTB

Kleines Video aufgenommen mit einer Gopro

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J4JlaklW6g

I’m happy to announce that after several month of work the GCOPTER SW including the possibility to extend the functionality using the 2nd serial interface is now included in the latest SW update from Conrad Electronic. This update is available for all Conrad Quadrocopters (450 and 650) and will also be available for the upcoming MEMS version.
In Addition the configuration Software known form the GCOPTER is now compatible with the Conrad Quadros. However the “old” way to configure the Quadro by using the Transmitter is still available.

I’m still happy to provide additional information for those who are willing to extend the Conrad Qadro or would like to build professional applications with the Conrad Quadro electronics.

The Gluon Control Station has the unique capability to replay a logged flight.

This allows Gluonpilot owners to analyse their flights, but also allows non-gluonpilot owners to get the feel of the Gluon Control Station!

Attached at the end of this post you will find my latest funjet flight. As you will see when flying circles, it was very windy (+- 7m/s), but no problem for the gluonpilot! For the demo, it was a short flight with only few waypoints, but with auto-takeoff and auto-landing.

The flight plan is as follows:

• Block Takeoff
  • This will fly in the take-off direction until the desired altitude has been reached (40m)
• Block Standby
  • In this block, the UAV is waiting for input, and flies in a circle while waiting
• Block Route
  • Here a very basic 3-waypoint route is flown using the FLY_TO command
• Block Descent
  • This circle is used to lose altitude. When the descent is done, the plane will fly 30m above ground in a circle
• Block Flare
  • This command will make the UAV cut throttle and glide on the line between the descent-circle and the flare waypoint.

Using the buttons on the GCS, you can switch between the different blocks. The current block-button is highlighted in yellow.

Some tips when using the GCS:

• Pressing "i" will zoom In
• Pressing "o" will zoom Out
• Pressing "c" will center the view on the plane
• Pressing the first letter of a block will make the UAV go to this block (not available in replay mode :) )
• Draw the map with your left mouse button
• Right click on the map or a waypoint to see the context menu
• Waypoints can be dragged, but they will remain gray because they won't be synchronized with the Gluonpilot

Download Gluon Control Station 0.7.1 (or newer) to replay this flight.

Download the Flightlog for replay.

Hi everyone,

As you probably notice I am very busy lately. Together with some friends we were working on the Quadshot an aerobatic blend between a quadrocopter and an airplane.

It takes off and lands vertically like a quadrocopter as well as it can fly forward like an airplane using its wing to add additional lift extending flight time.

We submitted the project to Kickstarter and we are very happy to see that we got such a great response. The Kickstarter funding runs for another three days and if you pledge you can get a Quadshot at a discounted price as a reward.

At it’s heart Quadshot is using the avionics and software framework of Paparazzi. We developed the additional necessary controls for Quadshot and released them. So Quadshot has Open-Hardware electronics and Open-Source firmware making it a great platform for research and hacking.

Having an autopilot makes it also very easy to fly for a beginner RC pilot.

I hope to find some more time in the future to get into more details about Quadshot. But till then check out the following links:

• our project website
• videos
• forum
• Paparazzi UAV wiki
• our Kickstarter project page

Cheers Esden

Wanted for years, anticipated for months, under development and rigorous testing since May. Here it finally is: the first public release of the Gluon Control Station :-)

Despite it young age, it is already quite advanced. I tried to steal functionality from all systems I liked:

• Automatic navigation blocks + goto buttons (as in paparazzi)
• On the fly (airborne) change of waypoints/navigation commands (as in micropilot)
• Simple scripting
• On-screen documentation
• Live and in-flight configuration

Next to more common functionality

• Drag and drop of waypoints
• Status of all subsystems
• Navigation information
• Graphs
• ...

Thanks to a commercial partner (who already spent a lot of time on it), it has been tested in numerous flights and is thus safe to use.

This is released together with v0.7 of the firmware. The main new functionality is the addition of checksums during communication (to make sure we can drag and rop our waypoints safely during flight :-) ).

Stay tuned for video tutorials, log files for replay (yeay!) and many new features.

Download and play: firmware | Gluon Control Station installer

If you are interested in gluonpilot, please check out our ready to fly modules: they are the perfect and quick match for Gluon CS!

For my backpacking trip I was in the need for a new kopter. My old one was too cumbersome for transport and not reliable enough because I crashed it a lot when testing software or by brutal fun flying. At home this was no problem, but on the trip I can only carry few tools and spare parts. I decided to build an koax y6 because:






I call this Kopter Voyager mainly because when I collapse it - it looks like a NCC and I really like Star-Trek ;-) Beside that this Kopter is for traveling purposes and voyager reflects that very good.
Here are some aerial Pictures taken with this MK.
And Here is the ( sorry german - but you can look at the images or use google translate ) blog of this trip.

On request, I updated the webshop with more kits:

• Extension board kits + optional OSD
• Ground Control Station kits contain the extension board and everything else needed (including XBee's!).

Using these kits, people with a busy life will be able to stop at one shop and buy everything they need. For more information, please do not hesitate to contact me.

A new release is available!

Release 0.6 contains a lot of fixes and improvements. One of the new features is automatic throttle, depending on the target altitude of the next waypoint. Currently no "security mechanism" has been implemented, so watch your propellor when enabling auto-throttle!

Gluonconfig now also includes a "Basic configuration" window. It contains all the settings you need to change when buying a RTF kit. Also, changes you do are direct: no write or burn needed.

Attention: the new firmware uses 57600 baud. Firmware upgrade is still done using 115200 (automatically when upgrading the firmware using gluonconfig).

Let yourself go: gluonconfig and the firmware.

UPDATE

Due to some "imperfections", version 0.6.1 is available! Firmware and Gluonconfig

NOTES

Before the update, make sure to backup your configuration and reload it when using the new firmware.

For seeing the 3D plane (see thumbnail), please install the DirectX runtime environment: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=35

This new release uses .NET 4.0, please upgrade if needed: http://www.microsoft.com/net/Download.aspx

I did a short video for a friend of mine. The video was taken with a Hexakopter and a fixed GoPro HD was mounted directly under the LiPo Battery. Details about the party can be found on www.poolparty.at

[Im Feed kann dieses Video nicht angezeigt werden.Klicke zum Blogeintrag um das Video anzusehen.]

Hi!

The hardware of my quad is now complete and assembled! Yay!

As pictures say more than a thousand words, here are some photos which show an overview of the whole construction and some details:

The motor controllers are all connected to the central power distribution board (PDB for short), which is also directly connected to the battery. The Lisa/M is mounted in the center of the PDB and rests on a piece of foam rubber, which is a very soft but still tight material. On the one side, the foam rubber prevents short circuits through the copper beneath, on the other side, it helps in mounting the board in level with the frame, as the bottom of Lisa/M is not flat.

The motor cables are held to the frame using Velcro strips. The RC receiver is also held by one of those strips, as you can see in the second photo. The battery is mounted on the bottom also using velcro strips (I hope they will be strong enough when in flight, but as I can lift the quad only holding the battery, I don’t think this will be a problem). Finally, I have added a piece of heat insulation tube (which is light, but quite stable) on each arm of the quad to keep the battery from touching the ground and to act as a damper in case of hard landings .

By the way: the transmitter problem is also solved. There seems to be some problem when building the paparazzi software inside of a 32-bit chroot environment on 64-bit systems. The DX6i transmitter works without any problems when building the software on a real 32-bit system or inside a virtual machine. So, if you want to use paparazzi, too, I recommend to use a real 32-bit system or a VM.

To summarize: The hardware seems to work completely now. I still have some software/configuration problems, which will hopefully be solved soon with some help from the paparazzi team . So I think it’s not long until the first flight!

After a long delay, the gluonpilot modules are back in stock!

I am more than happy to mark one of them with serialnumber 100!

Go to the webshop and don't forget the GPS module and FTDI cable to program & configure your UAV!

Stay tuned: in the coming days & weeks the upcoming v0.6 firmware and accompanying Gluon Control Station will be announced.

Hi again!

Yesterday I basically built an aluminum frame for my quadrocopter in a six-hour marathon. Before I go into detail, I’ve got some pictures for you:

As you can see, the frame mainly consists of square aluminum pipe, which you can buy at any hardware store. The dimensions of the pipe I used are 15.5x15.5x1000mm with a thickness of 1.5mm.

To get the two rods on the same level, I cut halfway through each one so I could put them together to a “plus” form. The whole construction is held together by four screws with 6 mm in diameter and two solid plates, consisting of wood on the top and plexiglass on the bottom (maybe I'll put some LEDs there some day ).

The topmost plate you see is the “Power Distribution Board”, which will connect all the motor controllers to the battery in the end (I hope the 5mm tracks are enough for 50A peak current ) and also hold the Lisa/M.

---

So, that’s the new frame, and here comes the status update for the rest of the thing:

First the bad news: I returned my Spektrum DX6i to manufacture because the first channel wasn’t received correctly by the Hobbyking Orange receivers. I also tested with another DX6i, which worked, so I assumed there must be something wrong with my transmitter. Today I was told by the Spektrum support that my receiver works perfectly normal, but I got the DSMX version which obviously has some compatibility problems with my “unofficial” setup. Maybe it’s possible to implement some workaround in the Paparazzi software, or I have to get myself the DSM2-only version of the DX6i.

At least there’s some progress: propellers are ordered and should arrive this week!

So in general, I guess it doesn’t look too bad for my goal of flying this thing at the Chaos Communication Camp (maybe with someone else’s transmitter...).

Hi there,
today i can proudly present: Kevin-frame.

Kevin-frame isn't a serious project, it's just a crossed aluminium square bar with 15x15mm edge length. Both arms are 50cm long.

It's build out of a frustrated situation where Hobby King delays in sending me my frames (they got lost somewhere between HongKong and Germany in march - investigation is running - can take a looong time :/). So hopefully this is just a temporary solution for the "frame problem", but i wanted to start my multicopter project now and here it is.

The name for the Kevin-frame is  named after the "Kevin" and the well-known phenomenon (in Germany) of people who name their average child "Kevin". This phenomenon and the prejudice coming along with it is called Kevinismus(link-language: german). In short: A person who has "Kevinismus" isn't really loved by it's parents and often lives an isolated life .
This is how i see my first frame. It should work for a few month and after that "i'll toss it away like yesterday's jam" .

But now have a look on that aluminium-made dream, fixed with an M6 screw, a wingnut, two metal shims and some of that magic "UHU Threadlocker" glue.

The time is near... The Chaos Communication Camp 2011 will start the 10th August and continue until the 14th August in Finowfurt near Berlin, Germany Europe, Earth, Milkyway!

Chaos Communication Camp 2011 Trailer from elektropunk on Vimeo.

The Chaos Communication Camp 2011 is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. It provides a relaxed atmosphere for free exchange of technical, social, and political ideas. The Camp has everything you need: power, internet, food and fun. Bring your tent and participate!

Make sure to join us in the UAVP-NG Village at the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 in Finowfurt!

So it’s been over a year since I posted about that NERF turret! I’ve not been totally idle since but nothing’s really finished to a high enough standard to blog about. Instead, here’s a post of almost-finished projects, crushed dreams and lost hopes!

July 2010: I built this pretty firefly from some paperclips, LEDs and an ATtiny. It lights up when you hold it, and sleeps the rest of the time. When it lights up, though, it pulses pretty firefly patterns using an 8-bit pseudo-random shift register.

August 2010: Jon and I soldered up the first revision of SelWX, which took ages due to some bent pins on the STM32. Sadly we never got around to writing much code for it so while we got it pinging, that’s about it for r1. We’ll probably do an r2 fairly soon with easier hardware and try to get something working.

October 2010: I wanted to make my long coat light up, so I sewed 20 lillypad LEDs into it. It worked, but only very briefly before my power busses broke, and sadly I didn’t get any photos of it in action. I’ve got the parts to redo it for this winter season though =D

January 2011: Jon and I tried to make a small FM radio transmitter, but it didn’t work. We didn’t have much time to investigate why. I also made a nightlight out of epoxy and coloured dyes and LEDs and all that, but sadly don’t have any photos.

May 2011: I took apart this NERF gun to try and mod it to be fully electronically automatic, with a micro stepper motor mounted inside the clip and a small solenoid actuating the mechanism. Unfortunately the mounting hardware involved proved really complex, and a surprisingly amount of force was required to actuate, so nothing really came of this (but now I have some steppers, solenoids and drivers in my spare parts…)

June 2011: I made this breakout board for an ADF7012 radio to test out some new telemetry ideas for CU Spaceflight. It’s not working yet, but hopefully soon…

Anyway maybe now I’ll do some more hardware stuff and actually blog about it in time!

Hi all!

As you probably know, neighter Taarek nor I ever flew anything before we found out about quadcopters. We were real noobs when we started with the stuff and trough having flown the old UAVP and the commercial MK we both never had a lot of pilot experience.

Switching to the UAVP-NG did not really help the issue. As a test pilot you are never sure if the fault was yours or if the software or hardware failed... ;)

Still after a while you get a bit of feeling for piloting and it seems that Taarek finally got the groove. Using a not so heavy NG probably helped too as we did this using our new Mini-NG, which you can see on the following picture:

Using the above Mini-NG it has suddenly become quite easy to fly pirouttes and I did a small movies of Taarek's first stunts. Flying NG is fun... ;)

UAVP-NG - The OS Multicopter: Taarek's first pirouettes from Amir Guindehi on Vimeo.

These are Taarek's first pirouttes flown with my brand new Mini-NG

Best regards!
- Amir

Hello everybody!

Finally I found the time to update my blog! End of last month we had the 5. NG Developer Meeting in Heidelberg. Ben and Volker organized the event and it was a lot of fun! Peoples from all over Europe showed up and we had 3 days of BBQ, discussions and flying.

Now, a month later some of the movies shot have been cut and posted to the net. Below you find Robert's and my moving pictures of the event.

UAVP-NG - The OS Multicopter: 5. Developer Meeting in Heidelberg from Amir Guindehi on Vimeo.

This is a summary movie of the 5. NG Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, which took place the 27./28./29. May 2011

NG UAVP Meeting Heidelberg from Rob Robot on Vimeo.

Short Movie of the NG UAVP Meeting in Heidelberg Germany from 27 to 29th May 2011

I would like to thank all visitors and special thanks goes to Volker and Ben for organizing the great event!

Best regards!
- Amir

Hi all,

I would not let you miss the great photo Timo has shot showing the size differences between our normal size NG (HW-0.22) and the Mini-NG (HW-0.22-mini):

Cheers!
- Amir

In the last few days I prepared the motors and controllers. That means I have attached all the connectors to the wires of motors and controllers so they can be easily plugged together.

Finally I built a little test setup with all four motors attached to a piece of cardboard. I also attached a piece of paper to each motor to get a bit of air resistance (but I don’t think it resembles the load of real propellers very well ). To be able to set the motor speed, I wrote a little program for my AVR evaluation board which generates the signal for the motor controllers, which was distributed equally to all controllers.

Here are some images of the setup:

I took these photos at relatively low speed (about 20% according to the signal on the oscilloscope). At full speed, the whole setup draws a current of about 4A, so 1A per motor, which is not that much, as the motors are specified for up to 12A permanent current (15A peak). I guess the current will be much higher with real propellers.

Anyway, I wouldn’t be able to test with much higher load, as my power supply does only provide up to 5A .

The next step will be a test of the Lisa/M with the motors and the receiver connected, so I will finally see if all the hardware works together.

This time I’d like to tell you about my plans of building a quadrocopter.

I already have most of the components, so I guess I will start to assemble them soon. For the record, this is what I already have:

• Battery: ZIPPY Flightmax 2200mAh 3S1P 25C
• Motors: Turnigy 2209 28turn 1050kv 15A Outrunner
• Motor Controllers: Hobbyking SS Series 25-30A ESC
• R/C Receiver: OrangeRx Satellite Receiver
• Autopilot / Control board: Lisa/M from the Paparazzi Project

Propellers, a frame and (most critical) crimped PicoBlade wires for the Lisa/M are still missing – the wires are already ordered and should arrive next week. I’m also awaiting a frame from HobbyKing, but that was somehow lost on the way to Germany and they have started investigation about it. But, even if they re-sent it tomorrow, it would still take about a month until they arrive, so I will probably build my own frame for the start .

Anyway, I still hope to get the whole thing airborne before the Chaos Communication Camp in August!

Hello everyone,

Another shameless plug from JobyRobotics. After many months of hard work we have finally reached a version of Lisa/M that is ready for a wider range of developers – you can get it in the JobyRobotics shop. Although there are still some things missing that would let a beginning user use it with ease, we decided it is better to provide it to all of the other brilliant non core developers and users. You can find out more about it in the Paparazzi Wiki. A big thanks go to OpenUAS for his great help with the documentation.

And before you start asking, it is not fully Open-Hardware YET! The schematics are available in the SVN as well as in the Wiki. The eagle board layout files will follow soon, as has been the case with all other hardware developed by JobyRobotics.

Let us know what you plan to build with this autopilot. Also if you have built an aircraft with Lisa/L or Aspirin we would be very happy to see them. Just drop a comment below with a link to a picture. Let’s spread the word of what is possible with Paparazzi!!!

Let’s get flying!

Cheers Esden

Das diesjährige Landkamp findet vom 02.06 bis zum 05.06.2011 in Ostheim vor der Rhön statt.

Für Kurzentschlossene gibt es hier alle weiteren Infos: http://landkamp.de/

Hi guys,

Timo did some very nice shots of an fully assembled Mini-NG, which I could not let you miss:

Cheers!
- Amir

Hello everybody!

It has been a while since my last post, again. In the meantime we survived winter and had a lot of fun at the 27c3, the yearly CCC Congress in Berlin.

Spring is coming - and as every year, we need something new to play with... ;)

The new Mini-NG hardware has arrived!

Over winter time Volker redesigned our original HW-0.22 into a HW-0.22-mini. The new hardware is fully feature compatible to the old one, is running the normal NGOS and was shrunk to a size of 5.5cm x 5.5cm on 4 layers!

The RC-Controller was moved to a small separate PCB so that only folks needing additional DSL channels or servo channels will have to use it. The functions of the SB-Controller are provided by the LPC itself.

Here are the first shots of the PCBs...

Top side:

And bottom side:

Next, we will test the new PCBs and should everything work out, we will make them available in the NG Shop. Please note that the boards need to have a LISL acceleromenter directly soldered to the board. This means you need hot air to solder it by youself.

Our first Mini-NG prototype was airborne in december 2010 at the 27c3 congress!

A fully assembled HW-0.22-mini (this is our prototype which was airborne at 27c3) looks like this (courtesy of KeyOz):

Volker did a great job and the new Mini-NG looks nice and cute (at least for my humble eyes)!

We hope to be able to provide Mini-NGs with pre-soldered LISL and eventually even with pre-soldered LISL and ADXRS620 gyros in limited numbers in the NG Shop.

Check the NG Forum for Project News on that.

Cheers!
- Amir

Freunde des Proppelleraufwindes. Es geht los. Das Kopteruniversum öffnet übermorgen für 4 Tage seine Pforten in Ostheim vor der Rhön. Es erwarten dich spannende Kontests, UFOs, Lichtspektakel, elektronische Basteleien, das große Kamp-Feuer und die frisch erledigte Kamp-Wildsau!

Jetzt wird es Zeit dein Lötkolben, deinen Kopter, die Akkus startklar zu machen – Zelt, Isomatte und Schlafsack nicht zu vergessen und sich auf den Weg ins Paralleluniversum zu begeben.

In den letzten 6 Monaten haben wir uns einiges einfallen lassen um das Erlebnis rund ums Kamp unvergessen zu machen. Sogar der Wetterserveradmin ist auf unserer Seite und wird uns ziemlich gutes Wetter bescheren.

Es stehen ein paar interessante KampTalks an. Besonders freue ich mich auf die Geschichte zu Lunars RGB LED Cube. 8x8x8 LED Reihen in Form eines Borg-Würfels der mit Hilfe eines selbst geschriebenen Winamp Plugins tolle Animationen wiedergibt. Das Teil gab es schon beim letztjährigen Landkamp und ist einfach überawesome schick.

Ohne unsere vielen tollen Sponsoren, wäre das Landkamp nicht möglich. Ich möchte mich hier in meinem kleinen Blog nochmal höchstpersönlich bedanken, bei:

• antennendiscount.de – Antennen und mehr
• Mikrokopter.de – Die Kopterdoktoren
• TLV Ritter – Veranstaltungstechnik
• K&C Netfox
• Beckstage – audiovisuelle Kommunikation
• Streckbräu – Das Kamp Bier

und ganz besonders, der Stadt Ostheim, ihren Bürgern, den lokalen Geschäften und ihrem Bürgermeister Ulli Waldsachs sowie der Jule Seibert von der Touristeninfo Ostheim für ihre tolle Unterstützung! Danke Leute.

Es steht soweit alles an Organisation und die neusten Informationen gibt es im Kamp Wiki. Viele, viele Teilnehmer haben sich bereits vor Monaten angemeldet und in den letzten Tagen gingen die Anmeldezahlen nochmal sprunghaft nach Oben. Es ist nie zu spät! Denn wer nicht kommt, war nicht dabei!

Ab Mittwoch gibt es Liveberichte über Twitter, Facebook und ja natürlich, auch wieder hier im Blog. So stay tuned. Landkamp is coming.

http://www.landkamp.de

Hi,

It was again a while since my last post, but as always I was quite busy. :)

The last news about Open-BLDC was about its V0.3 iteration. A lot has changed and happened since then. I was realizing that I am getting more and more inquires where people were asking about obldc being able to control very different sizes of motors, ranging from 12V and 10A up to 48V and 200A.

This requirement does not really ask for different logic and controls but it definitely asks for many different power stages. Open-BLDC was designed to be modular from the beginning but still to accomodate that kind of a power range it would be necessary to design and create quite a big lineup of hardware.

Around that time I had the opportunity to take a look inside a dead motor controller from Castle Creations just to realize that these guys seem to know what they are doing and that they went with a modular design too. To make a long story short I decided that it will be better to buy one of their of the shelf motor controllers and retrofit them with my logic. That is how CLogic was born.

As it seems other manufacturers are selling ESCs that have the same interface between the logic and the power stage too. Tekin for example. But my guess is that they are just OEM of castle themselves. But who knows. :)

Turingy also came out with an ESC that seems to have the same interface, the Turingy dlux. I ordered a few of them to take a look for myself and see if CLogic will fit in there. That would be a great source of cheep power stages. :)

CLogic has most of the functionality the Open-BLDC v0.3 had. Because of the size constrains I had to get rid of the dedicated i2c and PPM connectors, but I added isolation on the CAN interface that should provide additional safety when used on a 50V and bigger systems. The i2c and PPM interfaces are still available either over the new AUX connector or through the UART interface connector.

The new AUX connector gives the possibility of easily connecting encoders or hal sensors for sensored operation. So the interfaces stay very flexible with added flexibility due to the big variety of power stages you can use, while being very very compact.

Sure some people complained “The power stages are not Open-Source!!!”, yes that is true. Also these systems start at a higher power and weight class than some of you would want to operate them. That is why there is CPico Power. It is a very small, low power and a hopefully cheep power stage that we are putting together for those who want it all fully open! So no worries. :)

I think that wraps up the news about the new direction Open-BLDC is going. I hope you like it. I am looking forward to your comments.

Cheers Esden

I have been very busy lately with, amongst others, the Gluonpilot system. Currently everything is out of stock! I'm doing a slight redesign of the module and the extension module, so they should be back in stock by the end of June (rough estimation). If you are interested and would like to reserve a module (before they are sold out again), please drop me a mail.

Das neue iOS (4.3 bzw. 4.3.1) bietet jetzt auch die Möglichkeit eines mobilen Hotspots.

Da ich in letzter Zeit vermehrt Anfragen bekommen habe, ob Bob diese Funktion unterstützt, habe ich mal ein paar Screenshots angefügt. Wenn die Netzwerkeinstellungen richtig sind (wie in diesem Post erklärt) dann kann man auch den mobilen Hotspot aktivieren.

Es werden bis zu 5 Geräten unterstützt, wobei ich das persönlich erst mit 3 getestet habe. Sollte in den nächsten Wochen das iPad 2 eintrudeln, kann ich dann auch gleich den Praxistest mit dem iPad machen.

Mit Bob ist man also auf der richtigen Seite, wenn man wenig telefoniert und günstiges mobiles Internet haben möchte. Ach ja, Skype über Bob ist natürlich auch kein Problem.

Update iOS 5 und BOB mit Mobile Hotspot (19.10.2011)

Falls du Probleme hast den mobile hotspot mit iOS 5 zu aktivieren, dann musst du unter Einstellungen – Allgemein – Zurücksetzen – Netzwerkeinstellungen wählen und dann die BOB Daten erneut eingeben. Gegebenenfalls ein mal kurz in den Flugmodus wechseln und dann hast du den Persönlichen Hotspot wieder zur Auswahl. Der Fehler ist bei mir beim Update auf iOS 5 aufgetreten und konnte so umgangen werden und Tethering mit dem Mobilen Hotspot funktioniert jetzt wieder.

Gruß, Speedy

Heute um 14:30 Uhr fielen die zwei Schornsteine der alten Ziegelei in Groß-Zimmern. Der Clemens, Stefan und ich waren vor Ort und haben uns das Spektakel fast aus der Nähe angetan.

Wir haben aus 3 Perspektiven gefilmt, davon eine aus der Luft. Im Luftvideo ist ein Kratzer im Bild zu sehen der von der GoPro HD  Plastik-Linse kommt. Danke Clemens für die Unterstützung und deinen Mikrokopter.

Da das Ereignis nicht wie geplant um Punkt 14.00 Uhr stattfand, sondern 30 Minuten später, fand der Start des Kopters etwas hektischer statt. Das Footage aus der Luft ist unbearbeitet und absolut not-deshaked.

Hoffentlich finde ich jetzt ohne diese 2 markanten Symbole meinen Wohnort noch.

Youtube Direktsprengung

Hi everyone,

It seems I only find time to blog about the NG when new hardware arrives! You will find more about the new hardware below.

At first, I would like to tell your what happened since my last post from mid sommer! We were busy developing the NGOS further and we succeeded in supporting most parts of the hardware!

This means our RC-Controller now has control over the two DSL inputs and the sum-signal input. This also means we are now fully supporting up to 4 DSL receivers and two times sum-signal input for RC control. This will allow all forms of diversity, teacher/student as well as channel extension up to 4 times the number of channels you normally may have.

Furthermore the new RC-Controller firmware receives attitude data from the Flight Control's Kalman filters and uses it to do Servo Attitude Compensation for Pitch and Roll.

We implemented two servo operation modes, one where servo attitude compensation is done on servo 1+2 and servos 3-5 are available for other things, and another where the Flight Control has full control over all 5 servo channels. This will allow us to implement different Hardware Abstraction Layers (HALs) which not only use I2C actors but also those needing servo control like airplanes and helicopters.

Our SB-Controller firmware was completed as well. It now supports the MicroMag3 3-axis magnetic compass. To do that, it receives regularly attitude data from the Flight Control, uses it to do compass attitude compensation and then delivers the result to the Flight Control.

Looking at the device table on the Flight Control we now see this:

# show devices

Detected devices:

  Addr  Bus     Description

  0x16  I2C0    Atmel 644P RC/Comm Controller
  0x18  I2C0    Atmel 328P SB Controller
  0x02  ADC12   ADXR/MLX MEMS Gyroscope 12bit (nick)
  0x01  ADC12   ADXR/MLX MEMS Gyroscope 12bit (roll)
  0x00  ADC12   ADXR/MLX MEMS Gyroscope 12bit (yaw)
  0x00  SPI0    LIS3LV02DQ 3-Axis Accelerometer
  0x02  SPI0    ADS1255 24bit Analog Digital Converter
  0x03  SPI0    AD7924 12bit Analog Digital Converter
  0x00  SBCTRL  MicroMag 3 Magnetic Compass
  0x01  RCCTRL  ACT DSL Receiver 0
  0x02  RCCTRL  ACT DSL Receiver 1

As you can see all our newly supported devices pop up, even those attached to peripherial CPUs. I had no actors attached, so it's normal that they do not show up.

These peripherial CPUs implement a new protocol called NGPP - The NG Peripherial Protocol.

NGPP represents a register based store/load framework allowing direct memory access on the slave devices. It's possible to implement it on most physical character based interfaces, which allowed us to implement it on top of I2C and which will allow us to use it on other serial devices like the UART. Those of you knowing the MODBUS protocol will recognize a lot of similarities.

NGPP is able to issue several read/write requests within one cycle. It's also able to read or write multiple sequential registers in one request allowing for a very efficient data transfer between slave device and host. Currently the NGPP implementation is built on top of our I2C physical layer, which by itself is a task based framework able to run several "state machine tasks" sequentially allowing NGPP to queue requests and get notified when the finish.

The RC-Controller as well as the SB-Controller both use the NGPP a lot to transfer data between slave and host devices several times per cycle.

Current RC- and SB-Controller NGPP statistics look like this:

    NGPP RCctrl read:      16 ticks/100 cycle   (max:   17, ngpp overrun 0)
    NGPP RCctrl write:      5 ticks/100 cycle   (max:    6, ngpp overrun 0)
    NGPP RCctrl read:      66 bytes/100 cycle   (max:   76)
    NGPP RCctrl write:     41 bytes/100 cycle   (max:   45)

    NGPP SBctrl read:       6 ticks/100 cycle   (max:    7, ngpp overrun 0)
    NGPP SBctrl write:      5 ticks/100 cycle   (max:    6, ngpp overrun 0)
    NGPP SBctrl read:      11 bytes/100 cycle   (max:   13)
    NGPP SBctrl write:     31 bytes/100 cycle   (max:   36)

As you can read from the above statistics data, we have no problems in transfering the needed amount of data. Since NGPP requests can be issued during the whole closed-loop cycle as well as from any user space context (meaning the shells and their associated processes) we are free to model our code according to our needs.

We can access the registers directly from any Flight Control shell:

# show ngpp sbctrl

NGPP sb-ctrl registers:

  sb.devices          1
  sb.nick            57
  sb.roll           -35
  sb.mag.x          -67
  sb.mag.y           21
  sb.mag.z          335
  sb.heading       3164
  sb.test1           42
  sb.test2           43

And set them directly if they have a read-write flag:

# set sb.test1 44

NGPP: wrote sb-ctrl register 7 value:     44

To demonstrate the cooperation of the three CPUs in our distributed system, I made a small movie showing Servo Attitude Compensation:

UAVP NG - The OS Multicopter: Servo Attitude Compensation from Amir Guindehi on Vimeo.

After having implemented support for most hardware devices on the new NG, our hardware developers also produced a new revision of the NG PCB boards.

The newest revision is called HW-0.22 and is a pure bug fix revision as all 0.2x versions were. The next feature revision will be HW-0.30 on which brainstorming and work already has begun.

We received the new boards today!

Here are the first pictures of the new HW-0.22:

Opening the packet and looking inside it seems that the boards look fine:

We also received a separate panel containing the 7 breakout boards which we will include with each HW-0.22 board!

We now have six accompanying MLX and ADXR610 gyro breakout boards (three of each) as well as a LISL breakout board:

A set of these 7 breakout boards will be included with each FC+SB PCB set.

We will start to investigate the new hardware and should everything be in order, we will release them to the broad public. Be sure to check our homepage in the next days.

We will open up the new UAVP-NG Shop soon!

Stay tuned!

Finally the weather is clearing up! Time for a sunny instead of foggy demo: The "arrow" on the top-center of the screen (under the flight mode) still isn't working correctly, but I discovered why so it will soon be fixed!

This demo also features the "real" extension board instead of a hand-made prototype!

Finally it's ready: the first version of the OSD extension board:

Features are:

• Battery input (no longer 5V)
  • Supply 5V to the gluonpilot board using a switched voltage regulator
  • Used to measure the battery voltage
  • Supply 3V3 to the XBee module
  • Supply battery voltage (12V) to the camera)
• OSD chip
  • Camera in (a solder jumper allows you to use the 5V or battery to power the camera)
  • TX out (a solder jumper allows you to use the 5V or battery to power the video transmitter)
• XBee socket (not recommended using powerful XBee modules)

Both the bare PCB and the assembled module will soon be offered in the webshop!

The gluonpilot module was designed to mate with the HMC5843 breakout board from sparkfun. This is a low-cost 3D magentometer that is easy to use.

Until now the software was never really implemented to use this sensor (fixed wings can live without a magnetometer). Because I'm going to focus more on quadrocopters the coming weeks, t The first step has already been made: gluonpilot + HMC5843 works!

I bought the very cool KK micro multicopter. This small quadrocopter will allow me to flight-test my code indoors :-)

Stay tuned :-)

Philippe established a long distance record with his very cool gluonpilot-enabled Skywalker: A total of 26.9km was reached using half of the battery capacity! Congratulations!

Hey everyone,

As you might know some time ago I have developed a small JTAG adapter based on the FT2232H chip. I gave it the name FLOSS-JTAG as the idea was that it should be absolutely OpenSource and OpenHardware.

You can find the project at GitHub and some more info at it’s random projects wiki page.

FLOSS-JTAG not only has the high speed 24MHz FT2232H chip (there are some designs based on my idea that are using a low speed version of the same chip). It provides the new standard 0.05″ pitch 10 pin Cortex JTAG header as well as a TTL level serial interface on it’s second interface.

I am glad to announce that I have reached the V1.0 with it. All necessary files to make your own are in the GitHub repository. But if you don’t want to go through the pains of ordering PCB, sourcing parts, assembling QFN SMD packages you can also purchase it in the Joby Robotics online shop.

At Joby Robotics you get a cable assembly to connect the FLOSS-JTAG to a target. This allows you to debug and connect to targets that are difficult to reach otherwise. You also will get a cortex connector to old standard 20pin 0.1″ pitch connector adapter.

The adapter is small and will make it also easier to debug targets that are difficult to reach.

You can get precrimped Molex Picoblade wires in 10 different colors at Joby Robotics too. This way you can easily build a UART cable that connects FLOSS-JTAG to a device.

I am very happy that FLOSS-JTAG is finally easily accessible to anyone who needs it.

FLOSS-JTAG works perfectly together with Openocd and Summon-ARM-Toolchain.

Cheers Esden

Today we are pleased to announce the public release of our next generation IMU, Aspirin! After a lengthy research, development, and testing period we are now happy with the hardware and the software drivers for this unique IMU. It is incredibly small and light, three digital sensors packed onto a single 19x14mm PCB. The footprint allows you to integrate it into your own designs too. We are also making available a carrier board for drop in use on Lisa/L.

Besides its small size Aspirin is cheaper then the Booz IMU you already know. The use of all digital sensors reduces size, cost and complexity while simplifying calibration.

Aspirin provides 9 degrees of measurement (DOM): 3 axis linear acceleration, 3 axis angular velocity, and 3 axis magnetic field measurement.

It consists of:

• 3 axis accelerometer (ADXL345)
• 3 axis gyroscope (IMU-3000)
• 3 axis magnetometer (HMC5843)

This IMU is ready for the next generation Lisa/M autopilot that we wrote about before. The module fits directly on Lisa/M without the need of a carrier board.

We did not add an MCU on the board to save space, reduce cost, and improve latency behavior when connected to an autopilot. You have direct access to the sensor busses.

Aspirin uses the latest generation of Invensense 3 axis MEMS gyroscopes. IMU-3000′s advantage over other sensors (such as ITG-3200 found in similar IMU designs) is its selectable range. Selectable range allows the user to obtain maximum resolution and optimum performance, depending on vehicle dynamics and desired flight mode. No longer will it be necessary to limit vehicle dynamics to 300º/s, as Aspirin’s gyroscopes have a range of up to 2000º/s.

Aspirin IMU are available now in the Joby Robotics online shop.

As a side note, Joby Robotics also has crimped picoblade wires in 10 different colors. So you don’t have to acquire an expensive crimp tool and you are not stuck to only red colored wire. You can find those in the Wires and Friends section.

Here a small video of a Quad with Lisa/L autopilot with Aspirin IMU running Paparazzi rotorcraft firmware, for some additional entertainment. Have fun!

Cheers your Paparazzi team.

After some problems with my video transmitter equipment, everything was finally working well for a new test-flight! Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate, but here we go:

The only thing not functioning correctly is the "heading home" symbol in the top center. Other planned improvements:

• Waypoint overview/status
• Switch between meters/feet
• Turn OSD on and off
• Altitude plot?
• Overview of all waypoints on a map?

Let me know what you might find interesting!

The OSD extension module (stackable on top) will be available in a few weeks. Stay tuned!

Hi,

Just to give you guys a heads up. Several of the Paparazzi core developers are planning to go to the Chaos Communication Camp 2011 in Finowfurt (near Berlin) in Germany. The event will last for the 4 days 10|11|12|13|14th August 2011. If you have a chance be sure to visit us there. We plan to release some really cool new things at the event. I am sure if you are interested in UAV, Multicopter or Aircraft you will not want to miss this!

We hope to see you there!

Cheers, your Paparazzi Team.

I've been shooting 360 spherical panoramas for about 4 years now. Until today I have done them with a 700 class electric RC helicopter, a DSLR with 10.5mm fisheye lens and a custom designed camera mount ( our VR360 mount). The DSLR would pan and shoot a series of 6 images for a full 360.

The method mentioned above weighed about 13lb all up ready to fly. A bit heavy for certain missions where safety is of major concern. A 13lb rc helicopter can do tremendous damage to persons and property upon impact.

Also the DLSR method took about 3-4 seconds to capture. An rc helicopter can move quite a but in 4 seconds, even at the hands of a very good pilot. A movement of even 3 feet could create some bad parallax errors when it came time to stitch the images.

The need for a lightweight aerial panorama system which could capture all the images in less than one second was obvious but I put the idea off until a few weeks ago.

I had a few GoPro HD cameras laying around and had been impressed with their still photo quality considering the small size of the camera. I wondered if it woudl be possible to mount multiple GoPro cameras in a radial array to capture all the images simultaneously.

I decided on 5 cameras in an upside down pentagon pyramid array. This would provide the proper overlap between images. I modified the cameras to be triggered within about 1 second of each other and wired power from the copter to each one to eliminate the need for a battery in each camera. I created a power/trigger PCB distribution board with a voltage regulator to bring the copter 14.6v down to 5v. A capacitor was also added to the board to help filter voltage fluctuations.

Having flown several test flights today I can say it certainly works and works WELL!

Some samples below:

http://photoshipone.com/Superstition_Springs_1.mov

http://photoshipone.com/Desert_1.mov

Here's a shot of the rig in flight. All up weight, 4.1lb (1.9kg)

After a very busy holiday period the Paparazzi developer team are very pleased to announce the initial release the Mac OSX port of Paparazzi.

Although this release is a couple of weeks later than expected, the team is satisfied that this port will be easy to install and run. This first release still retains the look and feel of its Linux sibling as currently it uses X windows for rendering. This is due to change, as the graphics library used by Paparazzi (GTK+) is improving its support for the native quartz engine found in Mac OSX. This improved version of GTK+ is due for release at the beginning of March. The team are tracking this and expect a more native look and feel version of Paparazzi to follow this release.

The porting team has taken particular care to implement the packages as Macport ports thus giving a user the opportunity to install source versions or binary versions. Ensuring that every feature of paparazzi is available as it becomes available.

Again I am pleased to see the depth of talent in the Paparazzi team. Bernard Davison a relative newcomer to Paparazzi development made a huge contribution to the packaging of this port. Enough of the waffle though! The download install page for Paparazzi on OSX can be found at http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/InstallationMacOSX

Cheers, your Paparazzi development team.

The Next Generation Multicopter team would like to announce the source code release of NGOS - The NG Operating System under a GPLv3 license after 3.5 years of intense development time.

Check out the UAVP-NG homepage for more informations!

Official binaries:

* http://ng.uavp.ch/moin/Download

Release source code repository:

* https://pub.uavp.ch/svn/releases

List of supported platforms:

• NG HW-0.10
• NG HW-0.20
• NG HW-0.21
• NG HW-0.22
• NG HW-0.22-mini

For a complete list of changes refer to the Release Notes at http://ng.uavp.ch/moin/Download

The Beginning

This project was started in summer 2007, half a year after the original UAVP, also a GPL project, was released. All over the world UAVPs started to get built. At that time, many of us started dreaming of bigger and more powerful processors, peripherals and sensors. The current projects available at that time seemed not to be able to scale according to our needs, so the idea of something new was born. In April 2008, about a year later, there were about 500 UAVPs airborne around the world.

Having flown most of the other open projects available at that time some of us decided that they did not offer the resources we wished to have on our copters. Especially when looking into the future it seemed that none of them had the scaling possibilities needed. Studying the available processors we realized that we needed to switch processor types to get the computing power we dreamed of. Neither PIC nor Atmel could provide what we needed.

In the end we decided to go for an ARM7 and started the Next Generation Multicopter Project.

Our Goal

The development of a free Open Source Multicopter software and hardware framework for further research based on a high performance 32bit ARM7 RISC CPU.

The Story

We started work in August 2007 as a small team which met on IRC. The first hardware (HW-0.10) went airborne in January 2008. The software has been extended with a lot of new features after that. We then worked on a new hardware revision (HW-0.20) in summer 2008 and the first prototypes were produced some weeks before the 25C3 congress. The new hardware got airborne in December 2008. After 25C3 we improved the flight control software immensely and started working on the peripheral controllers software support for the new hardware. Having tested and flown HW-0.20 a lot we decided to improve the hardware in summer 2009 and so we started work on the next hardware revision (HW-0.21). We finished that in June 2009 and produced enough boards for all beta testers and developers to thoroughly test the hard and software. The new hardware got airborne in August 2009. Discovering small problems and print issues we decided to produce one last hardware revision 0.22 fixing those before a final release. We hoped to produce this revision before 26C3 and have it ready for a first public release at 26C3. We succeeded and did a hardware release with HW-0.22 at the 26C3 Congress in Berlin.

Finally having a stable hardware platform out in the green, we started working on the source code immediately after returning from the 26C3. Cleaning out the source, commenting and polishing while still implementing new bells and whistles took the time from then until today.

Be aware that this still is work in progress. We decided that it's time to let everybody play with it, now that the hardware has reached a stable state but this is still a very livid project and new hardware revisions and software changes have to be expected any day... ;)

The Design Principles

The design principles of the NG project are simple:

"Complexity, modularity and encapsulation where performance allows it, simplicity and directness where performance requires it."

This has led to a quite complex framework which we started calling the NG Operating System. The system uses abstraction and complex pointer tables where necessity requires it and performance allows it. It uses global variables and breaks encapsulation where performance requires it. We use classic Open Source tools like the autotools suite, gcc and gnu make. We adhere to common C design rules. And we try to provide a user friendly interface with features like help for commands and verbose error messages.

The Key Features

The NGOS has a design rather different from most available flight control software. Instad of building a fully synchronous system as most did, we built a fully asynchronous system which only synchronizes when needed. This allows for a much more modular design and also allowed us to implement modern operating system like features.

A Multicopter only flies as good as its algorithms allow. Since the model is inherently unstable the closed-loop control algorithm is most critical for flying. People tend to have different ideas about the right algorithms. In order to allow different developers to implement different algorithms and to help compare them we designed the NG controller framework.

Our NGOS uses a modular, pluggable extension framework for closed-loop control algorithms, called controllers, and allows for several of them to be implemented at the same time using a simple abstract programming interface. This enables simple extensions to the system's closed-loop control algorithms by people not used to firmware and system programming. The modular controller framework is coupled with a modular configuration framework, allowing each Controller to have a different set of parameters in different configurations. Several controllers have been implemented. We have a good flying heading hold controller, a Kalman filter based integral controller with a lot of features like PT1-compensation and more and last but not least a port of the old Wolferl-controller from the old UAVP, which, BTW, flies very good with a closed-loop running at 1kHz... ;)

The system allows multiple interactive command shells and their spawned commands to be used concurrently on the different physical i/o devices. This means you can log in to your NG several times through one of the two UARTs or the USB port. Other available character devices could be supported as well. The shell command interface is also very modular and allows developers to add new commands quickly for debugging and testing purposes. A command can "take over its controlling tty", which allows an implemented shell command to put the shell to sleep, take over the physical i/o device and start doing with it what it likes. This allows for implementing new communication protocols (for ground station communication or similar) side by side with older and/or different protocols without having side effects or worse.

Controllers and configurations can be manipulated online using one of mentioned shells above. The controllers output the results of their calculations to a physical hardware abstraction layer called HAL which uses a similar modular framework as the controllers. Different multicopter models (eg. QuadCopter, OktoCopter et al.) can be implemented and flown using different HALs. Different flight styles can be implemented this way as well (X-mode, Reverse-Mode). It's even possible to mix different actors (eg. i2c bl-controllers, pwm-servos and i2c-servos) to control models different from the common multicopters. We already support a whole bunch of HALs (quad, quadX, quadR, Y6, X8, X8X) and new ones are implemented easily.

The above is tightly coupled with a behavior system which allows the user to configure arbitrary behavior rules using simple behavior conditions and behavior actions. Users can customize these behavior rules according to their needs. A behavior rule is defined by a behavior condition (which can have arguments) which, when triggered, executes a defined behavior action (which can have arguments too). Conditions and actions are arbitrary functions implemented separately in the NG framework. The implemented console commands can be used to inspect the currently defined behaviors as well as the predefined conditions and actions. Users are able to define custom new behaviors using the predefined conditions and actions. As each condition and action can receive user chosen parameters these allow further customization by the user.

If you ponder the above behavior concept you will see that every and all of the current UAV features can be mapped to behavior rules. You need calibration on channel 5? You want your camera to make a photo when channel 8 goes to 100%? You would like to turn on the lights, when you have reached 10m or more... it's all possible.

The NGOS supports several different types of RC receivers. It supports the normal sum-signal input as well as the faster sum-signal from the ACT 4+2XS 2.4GHz sum-signal receiver. Furthermore it supports the proprietary serial DSL protocol from ACT which allows us to attach any ACT DSL receiver to the NG. ACT produces great cheap and expensive PPM, PCM, SPCM and 2.4GHz receivers and most of them have a DSL interface. The NGOS contains an rc-mixer which allows to mix several rc input signals in different ways. Currently a primary and a secondary device are supported which can be mixed as teacher/student or for diversity. As the DSL protocol contains the signal quality received the diversity mixer can mix the two signals accordingly. If in teacher/student mode, the mode can be switched using arbitrary behavior rules defined by the above user configurable behavior system.

The NGOS

Do you wonder why we call the firmware an Operating System? Now, we all agree, it _is_ a firmware, but it has become a firmware with many, many operating system like features. The NGOS does hardware probing on startup and activates hardware dependent interrupt handlers. It outputs bootup messages while starting. It is split into user, system and irq context, the closed-loop controller is running on the system level, the user mode shells have to use system calls to use privileged opcode. Furthermore it has a timer scheduler and a task scheduler with a process table, it has a device table and it has tools to inspect all of them. The NGOS's device-probing dependent interrupt handlers could be called drivers. The started consoles implemented as cooperative shell tasks in user context (which are able to fork off commands) executed by a round-robin scheduler conclude the operating system like features.

The Developers and Users

Essentially the NGOS provides a simple API for controllers, configurations, HALs and behaviors programming for developers while giving users of the system very broad possibilities to customize their multicopter and the available features. This way the whole system will be interesting to users and developers with its unique options and possibilities.

The firmware is built modular and enables different closed-loop control algorithms to run side by side to allow different developers to share and compare their algorithms and designs. The abstract closed-loop controller framework allows non-programmers like mathematicians, closed-loop engineers and similar minded folks to implement new closed-loop control algorithms without having to understand more than input and output structures of their algorithms.

The Catch ;)

Please be aware that much of this source code was written by a single person - me. I am an EE engineer specialised in computer sience, system programming, network protocols, high-availability, clustering and security. I'm in no way a specialist for closed-loop controls, embedded system programming and aeronautics. Please be aware of this when studying the chosen solutions and implementations in these fields. I'm sure many experts out there could contribute a lot better solutions.

This all was - and still is - a very interesting experience and a lot of fun for me and I learned more about embedded programming and closed-loop control than I ever imagined I would... ;)

Your Contribution

If you would like to contribute to the project make sure to check the development page in the NG wiki.
It can be found at http://ng.uavp.ch/moin/Development

Thanks

I would like to mentions some great guys who joined our team and contributed to improve hardware and software to where we stand:

• Markus Bechtold
• Michael Buhr
• Axel Burri
• Patrick Schmid
• Nabil Sayegh
• Ralf Hager
• Stefan Agner
• Tim Pambor
• Nabil Sayegh

Also special thanks goes to Wolfgang Mahringer who built the original UAVP and infected many of us with the multicopter virus and to Bernd Richter who infected us with a lot of new ideas and who was a great source of information and knowledge to us.

The Spirit

We hope to be able to provide a platform for experiments, new ideas and research for all Multicopter fans out there!

Best regards!
- Amir Guindehi & The NG Team