For anyone using Mission Planner as a ground control station, check out these additions we’ve made to streamline MP to our workflow. We typically run mapping missions on fixed wing aircraft at Event 38, so these are tailored to that use, but some of our features are more general purpose. I’ll outline the features we’ve added below and open up to comments about what you think should be merged into the master Mission Planner codebase. Let us know what you want!

Automated Pre-flight Checklist

We’re finally coming out of the dark ages, no more paper checklists! Mission Planner already has all telemetry data at its disposal, why not have it help check off setup criteria too? While the E384 boots up and self checks out each subsystem, the operator goes through the physical inspection and completes the checklist. Green means go!

Accessible Flight Planning Functions

To improve the speed and ease of planning a mapping mission, we’ve taken the most common functions from Mission Planner’s right click menu and made them more accessible by placing them in the right hand pane in the Flight Planning tab. Sometimes the most simple changes can be the most appreciated!

Cam Message Indicators

Mission Planner now leaves a trail of markers where each picture was taken, making it simple to tell when an area is not being covered as expected. If the aircraft is at a high pitch or bank angle when the picture is taken, the icon appears yellow to warn you that additional coverage in the area may be needed.

There are a few more updates, admittedly more specific to the E384 platform, but feel free to check out the full list here on Droneyard. We’re in the process of joining the Dronecode foundation and will work with the dev teams to get these features integrated into the next Mission Planner release. In the meantime, feel free to check out our source code on github, or just go ahead and use our compiled version right away if you want (Click Mission Planner for Event 38 at the top of the page).

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

Anyone in the field of technology would agree that the most daunting task is keeping pace with the changes that occur almost daily. What is state of the art today will be obsolete in a few years or even months. Schools try to keep up, but budget constraints affect even the most affluent schools. How could disadvantaged schools in rural communities have a chance to give their students a modern classroom with the tools students need to be successful?

The future of aviation is at our doorstep.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Remotely Operated Flight, Unmanned Aerial Systems, and Drones, are all names that are currently filling the news. Originally only associated with the military, Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming mainstream and readily accessible to the public. With the advancement of electronics, batteries, and motors becoming smaller and cheaper, it is now possible for anyone to build his own remotely piloted vehicle.

When Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is offered as a unit of study, the teacher has an opportunity to immerse his students in both introductory level activities and advanced design challenges. The UAV activity offers additional design problems and challenges that teachers can add to as they see fit. The course will teach students about the principles of flight, aircraft construction, and electric power systems while using modern manufacturing processes such as 3D printing and CNC machines. The unit focuses on an Introduction to UAVs, basic electronic control, mechanics, design engineering, scientific process, project management, problem solving, teaming, and the development of workplace competencies. The explorations are designed to allow students to begin to understand the digital world in which they are up. They will develop the project management skills that today’s managers need, as well as make connections across multiple disciplines.

Background

Mr. Anderson has been developing this program off and on now for a couple of years. In 2006, he came across a few old projects that the previous students had been working on. One of them was an old gas trainer RC airplane. He pulled it out from storage and hung it up in the classroom. It generated a lot of interest amongst the students and they wanted to fly it, but only a licensed member of an AMA club is permitted to fly a gas plane. You also need a lot of space.

Mr. Anderson did some research and came across a website that had a section on “scratch built foamies,” which are small lightweight airplanes made out of foam board. It seemed to be a great way to introduce students to many concepts related to design, manufacturing and the principles of flight.

The students were so enthralled about making planes, that Anderson made it a classroom project. “There is quite a learning curve to understanding all of the parts, systems and processes that go into building a plane from scratch. I have put a lot of time and research into this program, refining and developing activities. I believe that it is a great activity that can be taught using almost any technology education setting for those that are willing to put in the effort.” (Mr. Anderson)

The next chapter

Integrating flight into the robotics curriculum

Our robotics class helps to train students how robotic systems interact, and how they can help design systems for the future.

Students at our school come from a variety of backgrounds which include the spectrum of occupations in our community. We are also isolated geographically from events and experiences that larger urban areas can access. Students have limited opportunity to visit locations to experience educational activities. Our school is attempting to bridge that gap, by providing classes needed to be successful in the 21st century. Our robotics classes are a part of a larger STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) pathway that encompasses curriculum extending down to the elementary school. Starting in 6^th grade, students are introduced to programming using LEGO MINDSTORMS. In high school, students continue learning using VEX ROBOTICS and eventually to designing and building robots from scratch using CAD software and CNC machines to cut them out. Students program the robots using Robot C to compete in area competitions including BOTS IQ and Battle BOTS. This pathway gives students experiences, training and valuable insight into the world of engineering to prepare them for careers in STEM related fields.

By showing students that robotics is multi-faceted, encompassing land, sea, and air, students will have a better understanding of how we can use robots to help study our world. With help from our community and partners in education like 3DRobotics, our students are being trained to take the next step into STEM careers, preparing them for the jobs of the future.

Tyler Anderson (age 14) flying the Iris+ Drone for the first time

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

We are happy to announce you the launch of our Smartplane drone campaign on kickstarter. 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745804289/smartplane/video_share

Smartplane is a customizable  drone plane  with Software Development Kit (SDK), and with modular Hardware compartment. You can directly connect 3^rd party hardware and start writing applications with SDKs. This enables you to create your own aerial projects and not to worry about the aeronautical and electronics aspects on a drone. Smartplane flies 80 minutes. It can carry your payload up to 300gr when it’s simply plugged onto it via USB or Ethernet port.

Numerous drone development activities show the clear interest in the market. However, we saw that most of the attempts fail to achieve an acceptable flight dynamic. Be it flight time or payload, it just didn’t make sense to us to have a device that only flies below an hour and even less with the payload. On the other hand, the ones that achieve satisfying flight dynamics were ridiculously expensive. We have engineered and designed Smartplane with performance and cost effectiveness in the center of thought. Be it advanced materials or efficient structures, we are striving for a long endurance and powerful drone –affordable by everyone!

Do you have an aerial project? Develop and fly it on Smartplane! Or just select an existing option from the hardware store.

Naturally each phase of the development, prototyping and manufacturing a drone in serial production, requires a lot of resources. As we constantly look for investors, we have now launched our kickstarter campaign. Looking forward to your support! Please share with those who could be interested…

Best,

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

This time coming out of the UK from EpicTV makers of online extreme sports video content and drone re seller. Nice show, I appreciate the humour.

Blast this embedding! It does not work the video is here

http://www.epictv.com/media/podcast/the-new-dji-and-3d-robotics-drones-are-about-to-hit-the-market-%7C-flight-club-news-ep-1/602044

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

Hello DIY Drones community!

I am Melissa Brandao, creator of the FarmDogg and Founder/CEO of Rogue Rovers. We’re based in Southern Oregon in the amazing Rogue Valley. This is really new for me, but I am really happy to be a part of this DIY drone community. Sharing is exciting and scary all at the same time but, I got some encouraging words from one of the most amazing individuals in tech today–Chris Anderson of 3D so here we go!!

The FarmDogg is an all terrain, electric, semi-autonomous vehicle for specialty farming, This is our prototype Sparky.

 “Sparky” was just made his SF debut the MakerCon event this week.http://makezine.com/2015/05/13/electric-atvs-coming-farms-near/

I’m always happy to expound on why we are building Sparky–but to keep it short and sweet. Ag vehicles, tractors, ATVs are ridiculously dangerous and haven’t seen any real innovation in design since they were created. In the case of the tractor you only need watch tractor fails on youtube to know that there’s a big problem. It’s not just the structural soundness it’s the fact that farmers work on and off these machines and in close proximity. Multitasking in a car is never a good idea but we do it with some level of confidence knowing that 99.9% of the time the surface is steady and the car is designed for smooth straight and fast.

In farming you face a wide array of multitasking in ever-changing envrionments–operating equipment, checking plants, human interaction with the machines-obstacles, terrain changes, etc.

Likewise with ATVs/Quads which have become the ubiquitous machine of choice for many farmers as the rows between crops get narrower are heavily used and not really that right for the job.

ATVs emerged from motorcycles–a la the 3-wheeler, but that straddle seating design has remained even into four wheels. The high center of gravity, short wheelbase and track and continued increase in overall weight combined with that straddle seating design makes it nearly IMPOSSIBLE to free yourself if you get into trouble and feel the vehicle start to go. When the ATVs get loaded up with equipment in front and rear that difficulty just increases exponentially.

Anyway, this was the thinking behind the FarmDogg. Make something better–safer, more sustainable and then add a bunch of smart systems so that we can help to improve farm efficiency and safety at the same time!!

We built the FarmDogg from the ground up as an all electric vehicle so we could

1) entirely control the packaging design (ie. eliminate the straddle seating)

2) entirely control the powertrain (stabilize speeds, robotize it)

3) improve accuracy of data collection by reducing noise, emissions, vibration

4) modular-ize the design so that we can provide open source design to farmers that want to build their own racking

Sparky currently has:

-2 KLD hub motors in the rear with 10Kw of power.

-2 KLD 3.2 kwhr batteries on board

-2 sevcon Gen 4 controllers

-and a lot of other bits and pieces like 12volt, USB, 120 volt charging, waterproof handsfree bluetooth audio (a crowd fav–it’s way better listening to music than an engine for hours on hours)

Now that the event is over Sparky is heading back into the garage for some well needed updates and to start working on the robotics integration. First we’re replacing the existing motorcycle steering with a cool little Formula 1 steering system we are designing with the use of the original modifications and engineering.

We’ll be adding:

-sevcon auto steer

-honda odyssey fl250 steering which we’re modding to include throttle, etc

-new steering mechanism

We’ve got some work on the front end to plan for hub motors for the all 4WD version.

We’re going to use the ardu-pilot for rovers and I’m sure we’ll have some tweaking to do between analog and digital com via CAN-Bus. 

We’re also going to bring in some audio commands because of our whole “doggnition” thing, which you can read more about on our website–and I’ll write about later…

Please feel free to share and discuss. I’ll be posting more updates as we get going–feel free to contact me melissa@roguerovers.com we’re on twitter @roguerovers facebook and instagram too with the same moniker roguerovers 

(though I’m thinking i’ll probably set up a page for sparky as he goes through this amazing transformation. 

Cheers

Melissa Brandao

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

Georgia Tech Aerial Robotics Club is team of undergraduate and graduate students that compete in aerial vehicle competitions yearly. The MAV Challenge was last week in Virginia Beach. 

The mission consisted of taking of from a helipad and searching a known search area(20 ft squared) for a target. Once located the vehicle must hover over it for approximately thirty seconds. The vehicle must then transition back to the helipad and land. Our team was able to complete the mission fully autonomous. The arena dimensions are 100ft x 35 ft.  The vehicle also is limited to 500 grams and under 1.5ft in any dimension.

A vehicle was built around a powerful computer and sized with the Georgia Tech Electric UAV Flight Time Calculator(http://controls.ae.gatech.edu/dbershad/EMSTAirTimeCalculator.html). This helped us increase our flight time from 2-3 minutes(last years vehicle) to 8-10 minutes(this year). The tool also helped us determine right size propellers and battery to use. 

We use an APM 2.6 board for sensors data. We wrote code to send all the sensor information(very easily I might add thanks to all the contributors) to our computer that would process the information and then send back motor commands to the APM. The only time the APM does any processing is when the vehicle is in manual mode(stabilize mode). We are very happy with the APM and integration time was very quick. Possibly in the future we might switch to pixhawk board but we will have to see if we can determine the increase in performance is worth extra costs(maybe 3DR could sponsor our team ). 

Other sensors that were used are a monocular camera and maxbotic sonar. We originally used the apm to process the sonar but found the analog line to be noisy when compared with using the digital line(feed thru ttl usb). 

Without further adieu here is video from competition(first video with ground station view, second raw footage):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLHToSvsHgE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nddeyb5HRA

We’d like to thank APM contributors for making it easy to work with the ArduPilot. Our website is here(http://www.uavrf.gatech.edu/gtar/) which is a work in progress.

SOURCE: Everyone’s Blog Posts – DIY Drones – Read entire story here.

One set of DJI Phantom FC40 Prop Guards. Includes four prop guards for your Phantom FC40 quadcoptor. Designed to protect your propellers during collisions. They will also help you fly with confidence, whether you are a beginner or an expert quadcopter pilot.

Thi..

Price: $19.00

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

The Go Professional Cases XB-DJI-VISION Hard Case for DJI Phantom 2 Vision is a water-jet precision cut hardshell travel and storage case with a custom foam interior. It is designed to be impact- and drop-resistant and remains water-tight even if briefly submerged in water. The interior f..

Price: $209.00

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

It’s always good to have an extra battery for your Tali H500, especially when you are looking to be up in the air for a while! This is the Walkera TALI H500 Black Battery TALI H500-Z-22 (22.2V 5400mAh Li-Po) which is the brand new battery for the Walkera Tali H500 Black version. This is a ..

Price: $146.00

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

The number one thing you break on any sort of quadcopter or drone is the propellers. With this pack of Tali H500 propeller blades you will make sure you have extra for when you inevitably break a couple. These blades are self tightening so you don’t have to worry about them coming undone ..

Price: $34.00

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

Coming Soon…pre order now! Expected availablity: December 1, 2014

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

Coming Soon…pre order now! Expected availablity: December 1, 2014. This option comes with 2 remotes.

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

One thing most people don’t think too much about when you first get your quadcopter is that you will eventually want to carry it to where you want to fly it. While the Hubsan x4 is small enough to almost fit in your Jacket pocket, you really are going to want a carrying case to keep it safe. Th..

Price: $49.99

SOURCE: Ready Quadcopters: New Products – Read entire story here.

I’ve been wanting to photograph this hill for a while now. I can see it from my backyard and I’m always fascinated with how the light hits it at sunset. What made me love this photo even more is the fact that the hill is green, as opposed to brown the rest of the year. California has been in a rough drought and the recent rain has been bringing colors to life in the mountains.

SOURCE: Quadcopter Guy – Read entire story here.

One of the greatest thing about flying a multi rotor is that your not limited to one spot to take photos from. When your done with one just zoom around and change your perspective to get a different shot. In the panorama above I was over the driving range to get a better view of the hill in the background. For the bottom exposure I moved about 1000 feet to the other side of the road so it was just in frame throughout the image.

As I was shooting panoramas I was watching the clouds shadow move over the valley pretty fast so I raced to shoot another series of images for panoramas. It was such a spectacular site to see the clouds moving in so fast from the view live from the Phantom Vision 340 feet up and 700 feet away(Thats my white car in the parking lot). Happy flying everyone!

SOURCE: Quadcopter Guy – Read entire story here.