autopilot-announce — Moderated, low traffic announcements related to the autopilot project

[Autopilot-announce] Administrivia: AOL is bouncing SourceForge email

[Trammell H. <hu...@sw...>]

AOL seems to have designated SourceForge as "generating high volumes
of member complaints".  I believe that all AOL members have been
unsubscribed from the list due to the bounces, and I'm not sure how
to get them back if they still want to be on it.

The SMTP error that AOL is returning to the list is:

554-host mailin-03.mx.aol.com [205.188.158.121]: 554-(RLY:B1)
554-The information presently available to AOL indicates this
554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL's
554-member base.  Based on AOL's Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at
554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further
554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain.  For more information,
554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.  


Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@os...                   W 240-283-1700
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...                   M 505-463-1896
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                    KC5RNF

[Autopilot-announce] Hovering the helicopter under computer control works!

[Trammell H. <hu...@ro...>]

After a year and a half of effort, the autopilot system finally works!
Yesterday, Dennis, Will and I hovered Dennis' Nova for entire tanks
of fuel, with only the collective/throttle under manual control.
All control loops except altitude were closed and tuned.  We should
write a detailed guide to tuning the PID loops, which took the better
part of two full days.

Onboard the Nova was our IMU / Magnetometer / Servo controller,
a Cerfboard with 802.11 CF, and our new u-blox TIM-LP / IO board.
I'll be checking in the code that was used later today with the
exact gain constants.  These should be good starting points for
other folks for tuning to their helicopters.

Will filmed the entire flight testing and we'll have MPEGs of
the interesting bits soon.   I even "flew" the helicopter and we
have it on film!

The helicopter stayed in about a 1 m CEP during calm winds and about
a 2 m CEP when the wind gusts would hit it.  It flew in slow circles
while under computer control, which post flight analysis showed that
our hard iron calibration for the magnetometer on the bench did not
include the engine.

This resulted in about 20 degree offset between our heading and the GPS
north value, so when we would go "north" based on our magnetometer, we
would actually be flying north west.  It is a testament to the stability
of the inner attitude loops that this only caused minor position problems
instead of a catastrophic crashes.

As always, this could not have been done without the combined effort of
everyone involved.  Especially big thanks go to Aaron Kahn for all
of his code and assistance flying; to Dennis D'Annunzio for risking
his helicopter and being an incredible test pilot; and to Will Barger
for long hours of helping us build assemblies and spending countless
hours at the field with his camera.

We'll hopefully have MPEGs and charts from the flights available
very soon.  I'll send another announcement with URLs when they
are online.

Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@os...                   W 240-283-1700
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...                   M 505-463-1896
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                    KC5RNF

[Autopilot-announce] Software release 2.5

[Trammell H. <hu...@ro...>]

I've bundled up all of the recent changes and made a software release
that includes support for the Rev 2.4 boards, the UDP datagram protocol
and the Fltk GUI codes.  It also includes Dennis' imuviewer program
to display strip charts of the sensor readings and his Win32 makefiles.
The onboard code has been upgraded to use avr-gcc 3.2.

You can download the release from SourceForge here:

  http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=36164&release_id=148776

The imuviewer is setup for the pin assignments on the 2.4 board and the
servo drivers / high speed servo support does require either a hardware
upgrade to the 2.2's or the new 2.4 boards:

  http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_REV2.4.6DOFK.html

Please let me know if you have any problems with the new code.

Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@os...                   W 240-283-1700
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...                   M 505-463-1896
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                    KC5RNF

[Autopilot-announce] Rev 2.4 kits available now

[Trammell H. <hu...@ro...>]

After a long wait, the 2.4 IMU / Servo controller kits are available.
These have many upgrades over the 2.2 kits that we group ordered
six months ago, so here is a rundown of the features:

- Controller board and inertial sensors split into three boards
- Controller board is 1/2 the size as the 2.2 kit
- Full three axis inertial sensors
- 10 regular speed servo drivers with 13 bits of resolution
- 1 high-speed Futaba or JR compatible digital servo driver
- Full ground plane
- Separate analog ground plane
- Greatly reduced analog noise jitter (+/- 1 count)
- Silk screen and soldermask
- Frequency to voltage converter for tach (no CPU overhead)
- Better spacing on passive components
- RS232 on a header rather than bulky DB9
- Mega16 @ 16 MHz upgrade potential
- LCD header
- Three external interrupts exposed
- Futaba/JR PPM input (soon to have Futaba PCM1024 as well)
- Servo or receiver voltage monitoring option
- CD-ROM with cross compilers (avr-gcc and arm-linux-gcc) and software
- Proven design -- it has hovered a real helicopter!

The software is mostly compatible with the 2.2 boards, although a few
of the pins have been moved or reassigned.  Current development is focusing
on getting all of the new features to work, so for a while the 2.2's
will be out of the loop.  The current code base assumes the 2.4 board
with avr-gcc 3.2.

You can see an image of an assembled prototype here:

	http://www.rotomotion.com/assembled.jpg

The kits are available as kits or as assembled units from Rotomotion,
which is helping to fund the continued development and handling the
packaging, online ordering, etc.  The plans, source code and uses are
all still licensed under the GPL, so they remain Free Software.

Kits are available for immediate shipping.  You can place orders here:

	http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_REV2.4.6DOFK.html

Assembled units will take a few days after ordering.  They
are available here:

	http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_REV2.4.6DOFA.html

Additionally, we have StrongARM Cerfboard packages available as well
for a full AHRS / Flight controller.  This is what I'll be using on
my helicopter to replace my iPAQ:

	http://www.rotomotion.com/prd_REV2.4AHRSA.html

Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@os...                   W 240-283-1700
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...                   M 505-463-1896
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                    KC5RNF

[Autopilot-announce] Rev 2.4 board design available

[Trammell H. <hu...@ro...>]

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I've reworked the 2.3 board to be more modular based on the comments of
several folks on the list, as well as smaller overall and with the third
axis, too.  Some changes:

The inertial sensors are on their own boards, separate from the servo
controller / radio interface.  This gives smaller helicopters a means to
position the IMU at the center of gravity and the servo controller where
it is convienent.

The controller portion of the board is exactly 1/2 the size as before.
It is now 48 mm x 63 mm rather than 96 mm x 63 mm.  If you do not want
to use the inertial sensors but only want a servo interface, you can use
this by itself.

All three boards have full ground planes to help avoid the analog noise
that was causing jitter in the sensor readings.

There is no provision for an ADXL202-EB.  You have to surface mount the
two of them.

There is no ISP header.  You have to use the serial boot loader to
reflash the MCU.  I have never had any problems with this, even after
crashing one of the boards.  Still, I would recommend using a socket for
the MCU just in case it gets fried.

There is no DB9.  Very few people were using it, so I've switched to the
three pin header only.  The pinout has changed as well to make it
reverse TX/RX by plugging the header in backwards.  This lets you make a
nullmodem for different equipment.

There are only 10 regular servo drivers and 1 high-speed digital servo
interface.

The engine tach feeds into a LM2907 frequency to voltage converter so
that we do not spend any interrupt overhead tracking the engine speed.

There are three user headers if you want to use them.  On the Mega163,
two are interrupts and one is polled.  On the Mega16 or Mega32, all
three can be interrupts.

We have schematics this time!  ExpressPCB's software now includes a
schematic layout program.

Schematics and images of the layout are online here:

	http://autopilot.sf.net/rev2.4/

I'll be ordering three prototype Miniboards for testing tomorrow.  If
all goes well with them, Dennis will be organizing the group order for
the parts and silkscreened boards.

Trammell
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[Autopilot-announce] Release 2.4 is posted

[Tramm H. <hu...@sw...>]

I've just posted Release 2.4 on the web site.  It has some of the
recent fixes for different distributions of Linux and the code that
flew the helicopter autonomously with the 2.2 boards a few weeks
ago.  That seemed like a good time to make a "known-working" release.

For those of you with 2.2 boards, this is the recommended version to
be flashed into the Mega163.

The latest CVS code is, as always, better and more up to date than
the released code.  The 2.2 boards can function as standalone AHRS
now with the current head, but we haven't tested it on the helicopter
yet.

Download it here:

	http://autopilot.sourceforge.net/download.html

Good luck!

Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@sw...                     H 505-463-1896
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...               W 240-453-3317
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                KC5RNF

[Autopilot-announce] Announcing the autopilot-announce mailing list!

[Tramm H. <hu...@sw...>]

I've setup a second mailing list for those people who are more
interested in the high level updates to the project, rather than
the day-to-day technical discussions.

You can sign up for autopilot-announce here:

	http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/autopilot-announce

Software releases, major achievements and group orders will be announced
there (as well as here).  I would expect no more than two messages per
month will be sent to the announcement list.  No postings are allowed,
so there will be no spam, either.

Trammell
-- 
  -----|----- hu...@sw...                     H 505-463-1896
*>=====[]L\   hu...@ro...               W 240-453-3317
'     -'-`-   http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/                KC5RNF