Firetail UAV flight controller

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Camel

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Hello,

Don't mind me, I'm just showing off a project.

The project is a flight controller / autopilot for RC planes, with a Teensy 3.1 for a brain. I received four brand new PCBs today. It's the first time I've ever had a PCB manufactured, so I'm pretty pumped about it.
first_boards1.jpg

first_boards2.jpg


The PCB pretty much just makes the pin layout on the Teensy 3.1 more convenient for connecting servos and so on. It also has some sensors. L3GD20 gyroscopes, LSM303 accelerometers/magnetometers and a LPS331 baro pressure sensor as well.

The board is a 4 channel flight controller. It has pins for four PWM inputs and four servos. It could be modified to read PPM, in which case you could have 1 pin for inputs and 7 pins for servos. It also 'breaks out' all of the UARTs. One is for the radio datalink. Another is for the GPS. The third is used only for debugging at the moment. There is also a connector for additional I2C devices.

The software for it is the Firetail UAV software, which has been an ongoing project of mine. The software has been tested extensively in the FlightGear flight sim, as well as on real RC planes, and I'm quite certain it's ready to 'released' or whatever. Basically I feel that now, the software is unlikely to be the cause of a crash.

The project website is www.firetailuav.com

Anyway, cheers guys for the excellent Teensy little board.
 
Will do! I've got a foamy on the way. It should be here this week sometime, so next weekend will be it.

In the mean time, I offer videos of simulations - which aren't as fun I'm afraid. Here's the new autothrottle system in action

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc1cRHZ-Fs4
 
I've changed the design a bit. It now breaks out all available digital pins (not including the pads underneath the Teensy) so that it becomes a 6 channel autopilot instead of 4. It uses the latest MEMs sensors from ST Micro (L3GD20H, LSM303D and LPS25H). I've also moved the sensors so they are underneath the Teensy to save some space.

IMG_4641.JPG

This lot is off to Silvertone Electronics.
 
Just thought I'd do a little update. Last weekend we did our first successful long range autonomous flight. The flight totalled 7.6km with the futherest waypoint being about 3.2km away - far beyond visual range. The plane averaged roughly 80km/h and it took about 5mins to complete the flight. It held altitude beautifully in straight and level flight, but during one of the turns it lost about 30ft of height. I think that's something that can be fixed just by tweaking a few settings. The track error was averaging around 10m, which I'm quite happy with. Next weekend we'll be doing a 14.7km flight and it'll have a sports camera on board to film it. I'm really looking forward to doing that!

In other news, I've written a little article on how to connect an Arduino (or Teensy) to the autopilot. It's a pretty powerful interface to the autopilot as it can do anything that the ground station could do, including changing autopilot modes, uploading or erasing flight plans and so on. One idea would be to program a Teensy to read attitude information to make a stabilised camera mount. The article is available here.

Also, here's a video showing the bungee launcher used to shoot our Teensy-powered plane into the air.
 
12km of autonomous flight. We had some issues at the start of the flight and I stuffed up the pitch controller gains, so the first half of the video is extremely shaky. I turned down the gains after a while, but it's still not quite as good as it has been. Youtube has stabilised it a bit though. Nonetheless, here's a video.


The area where we fly has been devestated by fire and logging over the past 12 months. It looks like an apocolyptic wasteland at the moment.
 
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