HazardIMU’s Assembled and Working
In Uncategorized on March 7, 2011 at 9:40 pm
Working with Trent Young (grad student in flight research, he’s basically awesome) I got to test all 6 Degrees of Freedom (dof) on the boards, and all of the (tediously soldered and resoldered) QFN sensor chips worked. After a little retouching all of the SD cards worked as well. There were (still more) errors on the boards we fixed, and if we ever want to release this design I will fix all of those before we do.
Finally here is the previously only working HazardIMU here being lonely in the Plank UAV platform:
Now the epilogue: In learning about the design, programming and actually building these IMU/autopilots, I’ve learned a lot about what *not* to do, and I think I’m going to point this out as a natural law:
Circuit hackers in UAV groups will eventually design their own autopilot, or circuits they design will tend towards becoming autopilots.
I only have to look around at the HUGE list of open-source or partially open-source hacked together autopilots available to the community as proof. Just at NC State here alone we have gone through several (FlightStix – a gumstix-based autopilot, Micropilot, OpenPilot, Ardupilot, and now we use the proprietary Piccolo LT by Cloudcap.)
I’m right now looking at making my own autopilot. Still figuring that out now.
Ciao.
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