Fancy telemetry control display for a quadcopter

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Most of the quadcopter projects that we’ve seen use a joystick-based control system. This lets you fly the thing around like any RC vehicle. But [Saulius] is augmenting his control system by pulling and displaying telemetry data. It doesn’t really change the way the vehicle is controller, but it lets the craft roam much further away because the operator can watch the computer screen and forego the need for the quadcopter to be within sight.

A Carambola board (also used in this weather station project) is used to provide connectivity. This is WiFi based, which helps us understand the range it can travel. The quadcopter carries a camera, which is shown in the lower right box of the image above. There is also an artificial horizon, and feedback dials which display the telemetry data.

It looks like there’s a satellite view in between those two dashboard widgets. We don’t see anything coming up right now, but it’s possible this is meant to overlay a virtual marker for the aircraft’s position based on GPS data. That last part is really just conjecture though. Catch the 80-second test flight after the jump.

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Filed Under: wireless hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Giant pink hexacopter is slightly safer than the rest

May 2, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Check out this giant pink hexacopter.  We see tons of quad copters here, but their bigger brothers/sisters the hexacopters don’t visit very often. When they do though, they get all dressed up as you can see in the picture above. This prototype frame is meant to protect both the props, and the innocent bystanders as you inevitably veer into something you shouldn’t.  The frame is constructed mainly from carbon fiber and adds a total of about 1 Kg of weight to the copter. While it does fly, [AirvewLive] is looking for guidance on what prop/motor combo would yield more endurance. Anyone have some recommendations?

We know some of you will notice pretty quickly that he refers to this as a “ducted fan”. We realize it isn’t and we’ll forgive him this once because his build is so cool.

[thanks for the tip Mike]

Filed Under: toy hacks Tagged With: ,

Climbing the mountain of quadcopter design

April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What a sweet thing it is to see the first outdoor flight of a quadcopter. [Botched] has done a wonderful job of documenting the entire build process. Take a look at all that he has done, then jump after the break to see the extremely stable test flight footage.

Earlier iterations used feedback electronics that he designed, etched, and soldered himself. We think they looked pretty good, but he was not happy with the performance. He spent a bunch of time redesigning the IMU board, but after he printed out the PCB artwork he decided his soldering was not up to the QFN challenge and he went with a pre-assembled breakout board.

His post about PID tuning is quite interesting. He removed two of the motors and mounted those opposite ends of the chassis to a hinged stand. This let him tweak the feedback loop until the two remaining propellers were able to maintain balance even when he nudged the unit.

His test flight footage is accompanied by an on-board camera shot. He simply taped a smart phone to the battery and let it roll. Make sure you turn off your speakers before watching this one or the motor noise will let the boss know you’re reading Hackaday again instead of working.

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Filed Under: robots hacks Tagged With: , ,

Tiny Quadcopter gets an update, on the verge of flying without PC

April 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Crazyflie, the itty bitty quadcopter that uses a PCB for its frame is at the cusp of being able to fly without a PC. We were enamored with it when we first spotted it, and the Crazyflie has only gotten better. As you can see, a new PCB gives it a slightly more stylized look, but that’s not all. There have been major improvements to the design of the software, and various parts of the hardware. They’re waiting for the final prototype to arrive from the factory to test the ultimate goal, PC-less flight.  We’re not sure why this tiny quadcopter is so enthralling, but it sure has us captivated.

Be sure to check out another flight video after the break.

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Filed Under: toy hacks Tagged With: ,

Hackday Links: March 16, 2012

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Shamrock hat

[Josh] whipped up a shamrock themed hat by adding an outline of green LEDs to this bowler. Just remember, don’t drink and solder. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!

Battery-powered Xmas lights can be more useful

[Karl] took a string of mostly useless battery-powered Christmas lights and found a good use for them. He replaced the stock board with a boost convert and uses the two AA batteries as a 5V power supply when mains power isn’t handy.

3D printed appliance repair

The broken plastic piece seen here keeps a dishwasher closed while running. The part couldn’t be sourced by a repairman but the best solution turned out to be printing a perfect replacement part.

Generating labels for resistor storage

[Darrell] picked up a surplus test-tube rack to use as resistor storage. It’s a great system, but his Ruby script that uses LaTeX to generate color-coded labels is a really nice touch as well.

DeLorean quadcopter build log

No, it’s not a dupe. [Alp_X] found the link to a build log for the DeLorean quadcopter that headlined our last Links post. It’s in Russian but the machine translation should help a bit.

Filed Under: Hackaday links Tagged With: , , , ,

[Vijay Kumar's] TED talk on the state of quadcopter research

March 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Vijay Kumar] is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the GRASP lab where research centering around autonomous quadcopters is being met with great success. If you were intrigued by the video demonstrations seen over the last few years, you won’t want to miss the TED talk [Dr. Kumar] recently gave on the program’s research. We touched on this the other week when we featured a swarm of the robots in a music video, but there’s a lot more to be learned about what this type of swarm coordination means moving forward.

We’re always wondering where this technology will go since all of the experiments we’ve seen depend on an array of high-speed cameras to give positional feedback to each bot in the swarm. The image above is a screenshot taken about twelve minutes into the TED talk video (embedded after the break). Here [Dr. Kumar] addresses the issue of moving beyond those cameras. The quadcopter shown on the projection screen is one possible solution. It carries a Kinect depth camera and laser rangefinder. This is a mapping robot that is designed to enter an unknown structure and create a 3D model of the environment.

The benefits of this information are obvious, but this raises one other possibility in our minds. Since the robots are designed to function as an autonomous swarm, could they all be outfitted with cameras, and make up the positional-feedback grid for one another? Let us know what you think about it in the comments section.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: robots hacks Tagged With: , , ,
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