The 25C3 team has a post highlighting some of the hardware workshops that will be happening at Chaos Communication Congress this year. Our own [Jimmie Rodgers] will be in the microcontroller workshop area building kits with many others. The folks from mignon will be bringing several of their game kits for another workshop. We saw quite a few quadcopters at CCCamp and the team from Mikrokopter will be back to help you construct your own drone. They say it only takes five hours for the full build, but space is limited.
I’m making something very similar to that, I bought a remote controlled UFO and I’m adding more motors for it so it won’t spin around while flying. Then I’ll add an Atmega 8 as my micro controller and I’m thinking of sonar as my sensors or photo resistors. I would have Infrared but sunlight can effects it’s results. For now ill have it attached to fishing wire so it doesn’t go too high, but eventually I will add some sort of altimeter.
Did anybody here read Prey from Michael Crichton? Every time someone says they’re working on a uav, i think about that book.
read that book, dont think it relates to UAV’s until they get Hive capability.
I had one of those rc quadcopters, if you buy one DONT buy ones uses the mechanical gyros. They have a high rate of failing. Happened to mine about 30 feet from the ground.
@ t0ny@t0ny.org
Unlucky.
How about helicopter fishing?
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=nW150U-RuTE
Not really along the lines of quadcopters but funny.
Yeah, I have one like in the picture above.. that dome on top is the mechanical gyro. The problem is that it starts to drift and eventually hits the side of the casing, causing the control system to fail. It will then proceed to fall out of the sky.
I haven’t actually gotten it to stay aloft for more than 30 seconds or so. The only problem is that one (the X-UFO) runs about $150 vs. $800 for a DraganFlyer with electronic stabilization. Yikes.
on a related note: anyone know where to get a RC setup that can do at least 0.8 miles that doesn’t cost a thousand bucks, more like 300, or a set of schematics?
Also i’m interested in digital shortwave stuff, which still seems obscure to people without hundreds of thousand of dollars for industrial application specs.