[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
-- 
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