Just knocked up a labVIEW driver for the 3DM-GX3-45 GPS aided AHRS and what I can I say... AWESOME.
Hi All,
Just a quick video showing the Maja launcher & bottle drop mechanism in action ahead of Deliverable 2.
The old bottle drop mechanism was fairly dodgy so I have re-vamped it.
This is tricker than it looks as the water bottle weighs greater than 500g which is a significant part of the aircrafts weight and mounting such a mass directly over the center of gravity difficult.
I wanted the simplest mechanism possible to hopefully avoid breakdowns so I went for a single lock-pin design see pictures below.
So far I have been working on the general architecture of the ground station as well as some Google Earth functionality.
The ground station's architecture is centered around "missions", a mission is a collection of information pertaining to a single flight.
A mission currently contains the following information.
- Flight initialisation information (i.e. where do you want to start from).
- Flight waypoints.
- Mission Boundaries.
- Points of interest.
- Recorded flight data (recorded path, speed etc).
The following series of screen shots shows the flow of the ground station program from initialisation to main interface.
3DM-GX3-45
Microstrain have provided discounted pricing on a 3DM-GX-45 GPS aided inertial navigation system for use in the 2011/12 Outback UAV challenge.
Key features of the 3DM-GX3-45:
- Fuses data from GPS and AHRS to provide single optimal navigation solution.
- RS232 or USB interface (I went for RS232).
- Can compensate very well for GPS outages of 30 seconds.
- Tiny size (24mm x 44mm)
Single Board RIO 9606
National Instruments is providing Rescue Robotics with a sbRIO-9606 embedded computer & software for the 2011/12 Outback UAV Challenge.
The main features of the 9606:
- 400 MHz processor with real time OS.
- 512 MB nonvolatile storage, 256 MB DRAM.
- Xilinx Spartan-6 LX45 FPGA.
- 96 3.3 V configurable DIO lines.
- Mezzanine connector to interface FPGA with custom daughter board.
- 10.3cm x 9.65cm dimensions.
- Can be fully programmed in LabVIEW
More on product page here: http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/210003
Hi Guys
Just a quick update on the status of the IP camera vision software. I have added/fixed the following things:
- Will now auto re-establish connection between the camera/ground station if the link is lost and then found again.
- Any footage being recorded will continue once camera connection is re-established.
- User inputs required for initialisation have been moved to a dialog box that is shown only at program start.
- General interface neatening.
- Cleanup of the code.
Here are some screen shots:
This is the main interface, i have cleaned up and re-styled it. The empty white box on the left is where the controls/indicators for the target acquisition system will be going.
I have knocked up a quick little labVIEW app to do the following things:
- Acquire images from a Axis 207MW IP camera (wireless).
- Snap photos and save them to file with a meaningful name.
- Option to automatically save each frame as a .jpg (to create mosaics).
- Record .AVI files of live flights to disk.
- Perform target acquisition (for the OBC).
Hi All,
I have been very busy recently with graduating + new job so UAV progress has been fairly slow however slow times are over and I am getting back into it. Through a stroke of good luck I have acquired a new dedicated workshop to put all my stuff in.
Here are some pictures of my new workshop and I am looking forward to competing in the DIY Drones T3 competitions leading up the the 2011 OBC.
View from the doorway.
