Advent of ArduPilot

This post is coming after quite some time but it comes with good amount of progress.This post we introduce you all to the ‘ArduPilot’. ArduPilot is an auto piloting system which easily takes over complete functionality of an RC plane. Remember the arduino board I discussed in my earlier posts (if you have forgotten you can blame it on me), the ArduPilot is based on the same micro-controller. The Arduino series will go on but coming to the ArduPilot, it is made up of two PCB’s. 

One PCB carries micro-controller and the required peripherals along with communication ports such as UART, I2C.

 The other PCB is a sensor board which holds various types of sensors such as Pressure Sensor, Gyro, Accelerometers’ ( one along x-y  and another along z). This board also contains the telemetry port which is used to transmit the sensor as well as important flight data to the ground station when the plane is in air, via an Xbee module. A transmitter and a receiver pair makes up a control unit of an RC plane .i.e. these control the servo motors mounted on the plane. Now as the ArduPilot sits in between the receiver and the servo motors it acts as  the controlling unit,although (as we tried yesterday)  the receiver signals can be bypassed through the ArduPilot using a switch on the transmitter. 

The ArduPilot software is called APM Mission Planner and it is a neat tool to view the telemetry details. The movement of the plane can be clearly seen on the left side of the screen. The right side gives the gps location of the plane. All in all it describes every aspect and data.

If you have derived any question from above post  then place them in the comment box right below.

This is all for today,but the next update will be sooner than expected ;).

BluBaby- The first plane

The Project has two sub-arena's , Aerodesign and implementation ,and Avionics.The project started with these two themes running parallely among team members.Piloting is an essential component in Aerodesign and implementation and two members,Mayur and Dhananjay are already on it.To start of  with the former sub-heading we decided to build a 'well-known'  RC(remote controlled) model called the BluBaby .Click  here to learn more.This model is quite stable and handy for learners.The wing-span is 33inches, longer than other models hence improving the stability.These pics show the 'build' operation.

 

  

   

After building the plane we took it to the Jakur aviation base,Bangalore for the test flight(extremely anxious ) .
The launch was hand-held and after independence from our hands it flew elegantly on its maiden flight.Looking at this man-made creature fly was one of the best things we had seen .

 

Zoom...........

For details please leave your coments. :)

Next Step-The Arduino board

The Arduino Board is a quite famous microcontroller board in recent times , much because of the simplicity and ease with which we can program it in several HIGH-LEVEL languages,also it is open-source . It accompanies many useful header files and sample code for example projects .Well as starters we needed such a board which could help us more than we could do to it and Arduino looked the best choice.Arduino is easily available in the market with different variants employing atmega 8,168 or 328, but whats the point of buying an open-source device, hence we planned to build it on our own, that way we could understand both the architecture and the pin configuration.The board contains two important blocks , a Usb to Uart converter and the atmega controller with few passive components.

                                                                 Usb to Uart (FT232RL)

                                                                      Atmega168
                                          
The arduino software is pretty impressive and lend a helping hand to its user.It contains both sample code and description of  'starter' projects ,hence for the first few projects u don't have to code anything .Just follow the description and enjoy doing the projects.
K time for a spoiler.In the next few post you will see the preliminary projects we did .As for the first project,its going to be the 'Hello World' of the electronics world :The blinking led. :).
For details about the Arduino board please comment

Lets Start-Usbasp

A good place to start learning electronics and micro-controllers is by constructing a programmer.A programmer is basically a board which will burn program files(hex files) into a micro-controller .The usbasp is one such programmer which can be used to program micro-controllers, and this is how we started learning for the project.The usbasp is a universal programmer for atmega microcontrollers .The usbasp uses an atmega8 burnt with the usbasp hex file.The schematics for this is available here, this even contains the hex file to be burnt in the atmega8.It is advisable to use Eagle to view the schematics.Here is the pic of the first usbasp we made:

As u can see that the board doesn't look tidy and compact.Even the soldering has same state but this is the first board we made and so we had a lot of scope to improve.Of course we learned a lot of things from this preliminary board and enjoyed constructing it.The crystal oscillator with its two capacitor makes an important block. In the second usbasp board we rectified the mistakes made in our former attempt.We made it more compact and neat. 

Stay tuned for the next update.There lots out there :).
For any queries on Usbasp please comment.

The Begining

This is the first post and i am leaving it blank.Blank just like a plain sheet of paper, promising infinite possibilities. :-)