More crazy homebrew FC experiments

[jipp]

thats a bummer about the board not having enough memory. unfortunately i do not have the skills to take on a board like you have. so thats above my ability for now. i guess i will have to bite the bullet and look into the brain. or maybe sparky 2 will come out. but at 130.00 if i crash i hope the boards do not get ruined often.. i just could not afford for such to get ruined. well heck, maybe i should shelf tau/open pilot for now.. and look into the other options. i can say i do not want to play with DGI if i can help it. i do not approve of them being able to brick there hardware like what happen on the flight test episode of the 3k quad. now i have no clue if there control boards are open enough to know if they can brick the hardware they sell.. or if bricking is only possible on there own quads.. so i guess that leaves me with the kk, and naz32. seems control boards have quite a ways to go. i just want the options you mention, self leveling, hover, ) figure the GPS would help with that ) etc.. or lock position.. whatever they want to call it.. i think they would be nice to have for taking some video of the desert etc.



chris.

 

[jipp]

thats a bummer about the board not having enough memory. unfortunately i do not have the skills to take on a board like you have. so thats above my ability for now. i guess i will have to bite the bullet and look into the brain. or maybe sparky 2 will come out. but at 130.00 if i crash i hope the boards do not get ruined often.. i just could not afford for such to get ruined. well heck, maybe i should shelf tau/open pilot for now.. and look into the other options. i can say i do not want to play with DGI if i can help it. i do not approve of them being able to brick there hardware like what happen on the flight test episode of the 3k quad. now i have no clue if there control boards are open enough to know if they can brick the hardware they sell.. or if bricking is only possible on there own quads.. so i guess that leaves me with the kk, and naz32. seems control boards have quite a ways to go. i just want the options you mention, self leveling, hover, ) figure the GPS would help with that ) etc.. or lock position.. whatever they want to call it.. i think they would be nice to have for taking some video of the desert etc.



chris.

 

[HawkMan]

if you crash hard enough to break the board you've broken most of the quad. granted that's not saying it's not impossible to make some sensors wonky but most all digital sensors handle most crashes pretty well.

 

[jhitesma]

The only boards I've broken have been broken on my workbench

Well, I did damage two Arduino Mega's in flight but they both still work in some capacity. One I knocked the 3.3v regulator off of and since I need 3.3v for my sensors and don't want to add an extra 3.3v regulator it's no longer suitable for use on a multi. The other I Knocked a few power filtering components off in a bad crash - but it still works if fed the right voltage. And both of those are bigger boards with more things sticking out than normal FC boards which don't really have things you can knock off on them.

Honestly right now GPS modes are mostly overrated IMHO. They are nice for photography if you want to park a tripod in the sky...but really only DJI does it stable enough to really be a tripod in the sky...and as you know DJI has some significant draw backs (not to mention high price.) With gyro and accels you get self-leveling. Add in baro and you can do altitude hold (though the software on MW/Naze don't do it as well as Tau) and add in a mag sensor and you can do a better heading hold....if the mag sensor is far enough away from power wires, ESC's and motors. GPS adds in the ability to do position hold, sometimes return to home/launch, and on higher end boards autonomous waypoint navigation.

Don't forget, you can always upgrade your FC just like you can upgrade your frame/build. Start with an Acro Naze32 which will still let you do auto-level...then when you're ready get a Tau board or APM or something else that can do full navigation and good position hold.

When I started I really thought I was going to want all those GPS features...but having tried them I find I'm just not that interested. Maybe once I get a gimbal it will be nice to be able to "park" it so I can look around with the camera...but I find I generally enjoy just flying a lot more than doing video even though desire to do video was what got me going on quads in the first place.

 

[Balu]

I like the quanton board too. It's a great testing and development board, but the size quite often matters unless you are doing a really big copter. I'm using Qanton as a replacement for the defective RTFQs Sparky on my latest build and it barely fit on the plattform.

The current revision of the quanton also has two parts that don't work: The circuit to check the battery voltage can not be used and the buzzer connectors are not used by TauLabs.

What I like is the reset button. It makes it really easy to restart the controller after changing settings.

 

[jhitesma]

You can assign an output channel to drive a buzzer in Tau. I don't think it can be done directly through the GUI - but it can be done in the UAVObjects browser. Not sure if anything is setup to trigger the buzzer yet...but a bit of PicoC code could certainly do it. (All on my list to look into eventually, but I noticed the ability to define an output as a buzzer the other day while I was tying to test oneshot.)

 

[Balu]

I was just quoting the Quantec guys . One of them wrote me that the BAT connector is useless and the buzzer is not supported in software. I'd have to look at the schematics, perhaps they tried another way of connecting the buzzer than an available output channel?

 

[jhitesma]

Looked at the code last night and while it is possible to assign an output as buzzer...it does appear that nothing actually uses it yet.

There was talk back in April about revising the alerts system but it looks like it hasn't been completed yet.

The BAT connector on the Quanton is apparently a hardware mistake that makes it useless. Someone commented that the Quanton and the CC3D are both setup in code for ADC monitoring of battery....but I looked at the code on those boards and couldn't find it. So either I'm missing it (which is possible) or that isn't actually setup yet.

It is on my list of things to experiment with on my setup though...we'll see if I ever make any headway with it

 

[Balu]

The Quanton manual actually suggests something like this:

The battery connector cannot be used.

• Workaround: Use IN7 or IN8 in ADC mode to monitor battery voltage.
• WARNING: A voltage divider has to be used to convert the battery voltage to the permitted ADC voltage range (0 - 3.3V).

Side note: Don't let your laptop's power supply at home when leaving for the weekend. My dad's very old and slow "I need to be able to read mails and play solitair" PC doesn't like my tabs based style of surfing the net and will not allow me to do a lot of playing with TauLabs, etc. either.

 

[jhitesma]

Yeah, the circuit for the bat is bad...that's why they suggest wiring your own resistor ladder and using another input. But about all you can do with it once it's in is use it through telemetry to monitor your voltage.

You think that's bad...I'm using my dad's old retired notebook right now An old Dell D410. Building Tau's GCS on this thing was painful the other night with only 1G of memory. Doing better today...I found the DIMMS to max it out at 2G on ebay for <$20 delivered and they showed up today. GCS is now tolerable on it and builds only take an hour or so

 

[makattack]

Hmm... and I thought I was slumming it with my Dell Latitude 610 running Gentoo (yes, the distro where everything is compiled from source)!

 

[Tritium]

14 year old Dell Inspiron 9300 here since my Desktop Motherboard Caps died a horrible death recently (the old rupture issue from some years ago).

Thurmond

 

[jhitesma]

One of my friends is a developer on gentoo and keeps bugging me to try it. I have a big old Toshiba laptop my mom retired that's similar vintage to this little Dell...it's a little nicer with more memory and a bigger screen - but has some dead lines on that nice big screen and the colors are going funky. I may finally give in and try gentoo on there.

My main notebook is an Acer and about 10 years old. I also have a few REALLY old notebooks that I used for tuning the megasquirt ECU I built for my street legal Manx - but haven't touched them in over 7 years since that project has been making VERY slow progress due to my lack of a garage and lack of suitable work space Man time has been going quick, seems like just a year or two ago I got married and moved into this house loosing my garage, hard to believe it will be 8 years already this October. Guess that means I must at least be having fun

 

[jhitesma]

Been trying to flash this backup Discovery F4 board I picked up that arrived yesterday. Was trying to do it straight from Linux but having no luck. Tried doing it again from windows with ST-LINK and still the bootloader wasn't coming alive...then I noticed...this new DiscoveryF4 board is a little different.

Took a closer look...it's got a different chip, turns out I accidentally ordered a 32F401CDISCOVERYthis time instead of a STM32F4DISCOVERY Different chip, not the one the flyingF4 is setup for

On the upside this board actually includes a 9DOF IMU with gyro/accel/mag right on it (the one I'm using on my quad only has an accelerometer - no gyros or mag). But since the code isn't setup for this board it would require some changes that are a bit more than I want to bite off to implement since I don't think there are drivers in Tau for the sensors that are on this board (and even if there are I somewhat doubt they're as good as the MPU series sensors pretty much every FC is currently using.)

So this new board is going into the "experimenters box" for other uses. That's the kind of mistake I'm notorious for making when ordering components and why I have so many half completed circuits laying around I'm sure I'll come up with some project to try on it one of these days.

 

[Balu]

Hmm... and I thought I was slumming it with my Dell Latitude 610 running Gentoo (yes, the distro where everything is compiled from source)!

For a while I was active in the Linux from Scratch project - the distro where everything is compiled from source - manually.

That was fun.

But I guess, all that compiling made me hate it some day, so now I like to just drag and drop an app on my MacBook .

 

[jipp]

heh i remember the days i would only run native compiled code.. now adays im just not as active in such activity's. i guess once they started coming out with wizards than anyone could install it. i lost interested. i use to like the challenge but once they took it away.. i was like blah.. sure you could do it the old way but why when the new way worked. lol.. i remember the first time i installed debian onto a brand new Pentium 166 with a 2 gig hard drive and a 8m video card, and are you ready for it 32 megs of ram ( when ram was worth more than gold and hard to get seem they were always sold out )... oh that Pentium 166 was bad to the bone.. hah, now its funny to think my phone makes it looked so bad in every way. here is to the days you needed a case of beer, some dumb luck and a lot of old hardware ( usually supported ) hardware to get your kernel up and running.. then getting X ( had to down grade from a 8meg to a 2meg trident to get X to work.. go figure )to work was a whole different ball game it was because of linux i learn C tho. even tho i do not code any more.. but i use to be pretty active in it. i still have all my references books.. just for that day i get the desire to start a project.

chris.

 

[jhitesma]

Not to neckbeard this thread to oblivion...

Balu already heard about my first Linux install It was on a 486 I spent every dime of my high school graduation money on and was done with a stack of floppies it took me a month to download at 2400 baud (I had a really good job for a high school student making more than double minimum wage in a photo lab - still took most of my savings to get that modem!) But not only was it only at 2400...it was over public access system (The old Cleveland Freenet) which had a 60 minute connection limit and really only gave e-mail and a VERY crippled usenet interface. There was no FTP or shell access, but the email setup did allow attachments - as long as they were non-binary.

So to download those 30 some floppies of my first linux installation I had to use an e-mail to FTP gateway that would break the 1.44meg files down into about 50 chunks each and then pass them through uuencode to turn them into text before e-mailing them to me. I then had to download those chunks manually, recombine them and uudecode them to get the zip files to expand into the disk images. One hiccup anywhere along the line and I had to redo that whole disk. We had off-campus lunch as seniors and I had managed to arrange my schedule so I had no class over both lunch periods so I was able to spend an hour before school and an hour at lunch (if I was lucky - FreeNet's dial-up lines were ALWAYS busy, until I got that 2400 baud with autodial it was misery trying to get in...I can still hear the DTMF tones for 3683888 echo in my head even though I usually can't remember my current phone number!) as well as several hours each evening working on downloading it.

I still have a three ring binder here somewhere with the original SLS 0.89 (I forget the rest of the version) install instructions.

Good times.

Of course the week after I got it all downloaded but before I had worked up the courage to actually do the install a friend a year older who had gone off to UIUC came home on break and brought me a full set of install discs he had downloaded over half a shift in the computer lab he managed to land a job managing. Took him longer to write the floppies than it did to download

And a few weeks after that another friend who was attending CWRU where free-net was hosted gave me some numbers to the student dial-in that were never busy and allowed you to telnet to free-net without an account. A few weeks after that someone at CWRU installed a new lab full of SGI's named after the marx brothers and neglected to change the default passwords (it was summer, a week before classes started they finally changed them.) Between that and me finally having unix at home my summer became VERY geeky and I learned more than a lot of CS students do by their junior year

I was really bummed to hear free-net shut down in '96. It was an amazing resource for the people of Cleveland even if most of them didn't now it existed

 

[jhitesma]

So...this guy has been calling to me for the past few weeks. I keep seeing it sit there and keep thinking " I need to finish autotune testing on blheli oneshot."

But I stole the RX off this guy for my Hex. I do have enough parts to make another RX...but now that sparky2 is out I kind of want to try and put a RFM22B on here and see if I can't get it working like sparky2. The hardware looks simple enough and the required pins aren't in use on the flying F4. But the software...I'm not entirely sure where to start. I'll tackle it eventually but have to get past these crazy work jobs before I can handle that level of coding for relaxation

Then I woke up this morning to see Peabody in chat asking for people to test some changes to horizon mode. Before I got hooked on Tau I loved Horizon - and Tau's horizon isn't bad...but it doesn't feel quite right to me either. So I've actually been doing a lot more acro flying but am still willing to test horizon. So I dusted off the knuckle, pulled the RX off my hex for a bit and gave it a go.

Well...that didn't go well. Rear motors aren't responding. I thought this was ready to go with oneshot now. Hmm....spent a few hours going crazy trying to figure it out before finally finding that neutral on my pitch was all wrong. Doh. I kept missing it because:

1) I hate setting up the RX stuff so I was just re-loading the same setup over and over.
2) The config I use on my TX for this quad is reversed for this controller on pitch so I'm used to it looking "wrong" in GCS and didn't notice that it was even more wrong than normal.

Doh.

With that changed I finally got it flying again. Felt good, I forgot how enjoyable this larger quad still is with all the mini's I've been flying. The neighbor kids didn't even recognize it it's been so long since I flew it

Autotune with oneshot enabled did not give the results I expected. I'm going to have to check the settings on the ESC's because the Tau numbers I got were more inline with my baseline no-damped light numbers than with the damped light enabled numbers. I thought I had damped light and oneshot going now but the numbers are only slightly better than the stock no damped no oneshot and not as good as for just damped light.

Oh well, will have to repeat this experiment another day doing more sets of tests.

Pulled a bunch of updates to the code and am working on trying the new experimental changes....hopefully I'll get them built and can test fly them tomorrow.

 

[jipp]

you have a lot of irons in the fire. sounds fun. i have another CC3D board coming. im gonna try to flash tau onto it i think this time around.

i missed the post when you mention your 486 linux install.. its amazing how expensive modems use to be.. i remember when i bought my first U.S Robotics external modem.. i paid like 300.00 for that thing.. i still have it.. maybe i should use the plastic shell for a quad body.

chris.

 

[narcolepticltd]

Not to neckbeard this thread to oblivion...

Balu already heard about my first Linux install It was on a 486 I spent every dime of my high school graduation money on and was done with a stack of floppies it took me a month to download at 2400 baud (I had a really good job for a high school student making more than double minimum wage in a photo lab - still took most of my savings to get that modem!) But not only was it only at 2400...it was over public access system (The old Cleveland Freenet) which had a 60 minute connection limit and really only gave e-mail and a VERY crippled usenet interface. There was no FTP or shell access, but the email setup did allow attachments - as long as they were non-binary.

So to download those 30 some floppies of my first linux installation I had to use an e-mail to FTP gateway that would break the 1.44meg files down into about 50 chunks each and then pass them through uuencode to turn them into text before e-mailing them to me. I then had to download those chunks manually, recombine them and uudecode them to get the zip files to expand into the disk images. One hiccup anywhere along the line and I had to redo that whole disk. We had off-campus lunch as seniors and I had managed to arrange my schedule so I had no class over both lunch periods so I was able to spend an hour before school and an hour at lunch (if I was lucky - FreeNet's dial-up lines were ALWAYS busy, until I got that 2400 baud with autodial it was misery trying to get in...I can still hear the DTMF tones for 3683888 echo in my head even though I usually can't remember my current phone number!) as well as several hours each evening working on downloading it.

I still have a three ring binder here somewhere with the original SLS 0.89 (I forget the rest of the version) install instructions.

Good times.

Of course the week after I got it all downloaded but before I had worked up the courage to actually do the install a friend a year older who had gone off to UIUC came home on break and brought me a full set of install discs he had downloaded over half a shift in the computer lab he managed to land a job managing. Took him longer to write the floppies than it did to download

And a few weeks after that another friend who was attending CWRU where free-net was hosted gave me some numbers to the student dial-in that were never busy and allowed you to telnet to free-net without an account. A few weeks after that someone at CWRU installed a new lab full of SGI's named after the marx brothers and neglected to change the default passwords (it was summer, a week before classes started they finally changed them.) Between that and me finally having unix at home my summer became VERY geeky and I learned more than a lot of CS students do by their junior year

I was really bummed to hear free-net shut down in '96. It was an amazing resource for the people of Cleveland even if most of them didn't now it existed

I think it would have been faster to walk to the datacenters where the files/isos were located and grab a copy Sneakernet for the win!