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If you are buying the product, their English is good enough. Do you all own prop balancers? One of my props flew away and I learned that'll happen if they're loose, so I bought self-tightening ones. But I learned that they'll get loose on their own if they're imbalanced. So now I've got these self-tightening props, and I suspect they probably aren't balanced. What's the cheapest way to do the measuring part of balancing them? Can I use a nail on a railing?
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May 18, 2015 03:46
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Edit: Wrong thread.
DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 21:51
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refleks posted:Think somebody earlier in the thread posted about him. He got into a fight with the authorities because he showed how you could build a cruise missile from hobby components Spookydonut posted:I guessing this is the best place to ask, I'm planning on doing some cool automation stuff with model rockets. Either he's got a time machine or there's two of them now. Unrelated: I've got a 350 frame which the manufacturer says can mount a GoPro, and a GoPro. But I don't fly the GoPro as I instead cannibalized the camera and video receiver from a JJRC H9D, as those two pieces are the only redeemable portion of that aircraft.  This screen/camera combo only do one channel, and they don't let you select that channel, or tell you what channel it is, other than that it's in the 2.4GHz range, (which I only discovered because the VTx didn't play nice with the flight drone's own receiver). With this combo mounted on the 350 frame with a dedicated battery for the camera - it does not interfere with the ability of the aircraft to fly. This is the best thing I can say about the camera. The auto light balance affects the tint, so foliage looks redder or greener depending on how much sky is in the frame. Also it's got a range of like 100m at which point the signal cuts - no taper, no fuzz, no warning, just no image. This limits use to LOS but LOS is difficult to maintain as the screen is easily the dimmest I have ever used and the only way to see the screen outdoors is to shade it with your body or turn 180° and shade it with itself. It's not impossible to use but also not ideal. What's the latest on fpv right now? Is it still the http://www.horizonhobby.com/fpv-vapor-rtf-with-headset-eflu6600 ? Or is there a cheaper set of hardware I could buy that'd let me use the GoPro for FPV on there? I've heard it's a bit laggy, but I don't care. I use this thing like a camera on a pole. I want to look at things from overhead - not dance about or race.
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Aug 15, 2015 19:08
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APM flight controller question: What'd be involved in setting up a CX-20 to take off, follow some waypoints, and then land without my having to pick up the transmitter?
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Sep 3, 2015 04:35
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ImplicitAssembler posted:You need an APM*, GPS and probably a telemetry radio. (915mhz). Then you'll need either an android tablet or a laptop (windows or linux). You could in theory do it with a bluetooth module instead of the telemetry, but then you would have no chance of recovery, should it decide to go rogue. I have a telemetry thing, and I am typing on my TheLaptop. My flightdrone is grounded right now because the gps crashed it into a lawn chair immediately after takeoff, so while I'm mad at it, I've got time for soldering while I wait for new props to arrive. What's step 2?
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Sep 3, 2015 06:00
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ImplicitAssembler posted:Get the quad(?) tuned, so it flies nicely I meant more like, "How do I solder the telemetry part to the FC?"
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Sep 8, 2015 03:03
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Combat Pretzel posted:Actually I don't. I just assumed that at very high flight speeds, the airflow overwhelms the prop vortices (--edit: at least the turbulences created near the frame). Whether that's the case, I don't know. Some CFD guys on another forum say that the app probably doesn't resolve it well enough and it won't do poo poo. If it didn't require me to build some huge box with stator vanes, I could create a makeshift windtunnel out of a box fan. I saw a thing on mythbusters where they just bought a whole bunch of drinking straws, left them in their boxes, glued all the boxes together, and stuck them in a frame:  It was like this except for bigger - larger than a box fan if I'm not mistaken.
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Sep 10, 2015 02:21
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Combat Pretzel posted:
I know from playing KSP that if one electric turbine does not work, you probably need six.
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Sep 10, 2015 05:07
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I thought that flight drones turned based on spinning up one pair of props while spinning down the other. How does the stingray turn?
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Sep 11, 2015 06:32
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I straight up just didn't know it was possible to yaw at all with such a design. That's really cool. Can that FC work in anything that's not a Stingray?
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Sep 11, 2015 21:04
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Combat Pretzel posted:THEORY CRAFTING! Intermediary results of attempting forward flight optimized ducted fans. If you're willing to YouTube a lot, the guy who built a giant robot in the woods got a 3D printer around episode 70~ish https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13A11662BDE6EB83 He was running into thermal warping issues, and solved the problem by redifining the interior of his structures as being centimetre-sized hexagons. A side effect of his re-engineering was that his new parts consumed less material and weighed less as well. Are you walls solid or could they maybe not be? What if they were an evacuated chamber partially filled with helium? That would probably be even more expensive.
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Sep 14, 2015 02:17
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Is APM smart enough to be able to control altitude non-propulsively? Imagine you had a rigid shell with an air bladder inside. Have an exhaust hole and an inlet hole with solenoid valves on them, and a helium tank on the inlet. Could APM figure out: "Open this valve to go up, open this other valve to go down"? I'll bet you could get really good flight times if your drone was a zeppelin.
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Sep 16, 2015 18:18
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In that case I would like to add another question: I've got a big stick in the ground. I want to nail a light fixture to it and put a 250W IR bulb in the fixture. Then I want to do stuff like the irlock does, but maybe be able to track it from further away and use it at long range. Let's say I can construct an infrared spotlight, and I want my flight drone to be able to look at it and use data from a sensor to stay in one spot more accurately, but not just for landing. When I tell my dog to "stay," I expect him to remain in one location until told otherwise. If he wandered about in a 27m3 sphere, he would not get a cookie.
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Sep 17, 2015 04:58
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Golluk posted:Because sometimes that infrared source might be moving, say at the speed of a person running for their lives? Bingo. I want to build something that's a 4x4 sheet of plywood with 4 lights on it. The lights would located at the corners of the board, exactly 4 feet apart. Trigonometry and a light sensor that can measure angles is all a drone should need to be able know exactly where it is relative to the landing plate. I want something I can nail to the bow of a 14' boat and go look at drone things where gps lock won't work. A Yolo Wizard posted:Oh my god dreadllama I look forward to watching this.
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Sep 20, 2015 02:58
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I had an unpleasant incident today. APM Flight Drone was sent up, hovered, put into gps lock, flown off a ways, and then it took off way up high and didn't listen to anything I said until I took it out of "gps hold" mode into "takeoff" mode. I had a hard time getting it to land after I got it listening to me. It kept lunging out in random directions until I finally got it to hover right over my head so I killed the throttle and caught it with my arm speared through the undercarriage. It hadn't flown so unstably before, but one time a prop flew off and it crashed and so it got a new case and then the gps flew it into a tree right after take-off, and that broke a prop. And now I've put carbon fiber props on that are supposed to be really light and well-balanced and not supposed to break, but now it flies away sometimes. I would rather that my dog had wings and a camera than I had a flight drone at this point. I am sorry that I'm frustrated but I don't know why this thing doesn't work as it's supposed to be rather intelligent. I used to be able to tell it to hover and put the controller on the ground, sit down, drink a cold one, walk back to where I left the controller, tell it to "land" and have full expectation that it would both stay where I left it and land where I wanted it to until recently. I made the front heavier by adding a GoPro and an fpv-transmitting camera. Also I replaced the stock props with self-tightening carbon fiber ones. Also I drove cross country about 340km over the course of the summer with the flight drone. Do I need to "re-calibrate" it? Is that a "thing" that people "do"?
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Sep 21, 2015 05:18
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I've got a 4' x 4' sheet of plywood and plans to drill holes in it at the middle of the edges as follows: And at each hole, install an IR bulb:  They're at a fixed, known distance apart, at a fixed, known angle relative to one another. An optical flow sensor such as this one to be able to track said lights in realtime and locate itself to a high degree of precision relative to them: http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Optical-Flow-Sensor-APM2-5-improve-position-hold-accuracy-Multicopter-ADNS-3080-/310702206281?hash=item48574b6d49 As long as a sensor is able to track more than one target, and knows the bearing of said targets relative to itself, it is a simple cosine (I think) function to determine ones exact position relative to the landing plate. Pocket calculators can do that function as many times per second as my 9th grade self could mash the equals sign. I coded html for about a week in college and also I did some BASIC in elementary school on the C64. I do not know whether the following is a stupid question, but I will ask anyways: Is it theoretically possible to use an optical flow sensor to track IR sources for precise position-keeping up to 30m away?
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Sep 23, 2015 03:03
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Captain Cool posted:Things you will need to learn: I have a CX-20 instead of a pixhawk. I do not know what version of firmware I have and I've yet to solder the 3DR telemetry kit to the board. I do not know whose online instruction guides to follow. I furthermore do not know how to find out such things short of asking here. If I read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor will I know how to talk to a microprocessors's hardware units? If no, what should I read instead? Also, which flow sensor is best for my application? Can I fit both it and an arduino in a CX-20? If no, may I contact you later about this topic in May 2016?
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Sep 25, 2015 09:13
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Captain Cool posted:Are you just trying to hold position? Is ardupilot's loiter not good enough? Are you trying to make your own Airdog? I want to be able to put a flight drone on the ground in front of me, and have it ascend vertically to an arbitrary height, rotate 360° while shooting a panorama, and then ascend to another arbitrary height and shoot another panorama. I do not need to go fast. I want my drone to sit in space as though placed on a solid surface. Ideally I would be able to drive around on my boat while the drone maintains a precise fixed position some arbitrary distance above my boat. Ideally it would be able to land on my boat on its' sheet of lightbulbed plywood in spite of wind or waves or my being en route somewhere. I just want to be able to say, "Here's the boat. Fly above it and take pictures. Then land on it."
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Sep 26, 2015 05:41
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Captain Cool posted:Looks like Ardupilot could do this, without the moving base station. Airdog and Hexo+ could if they allow some camera commands, but without the precision on landing. Landing on a moving target appears to still be an active research topic. I don't think a mouse sensor and a novice programmer are going to be able to pull it off. I have considered doing this and posted about it, and discovered but two float frames: The Lotus whose camera bubble appears insufficient for a gimbal, and The Mariner which is $500 for the frame only, while optical flow kits are only $20 on E-bay. Flight drone will be smart rather than waterproof. I've got a different question: I figured out why all the apm guides didn't make sense to me ImplicitAssembler posted:Erhh, you plug the cable from the telemetry module into one of the telemetry ports. That link you posted is for pixhawk. My flight controller looks more like this one:  http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/adding-3dr-radio-telemetry-to-the-quanum-nova-apm-powered-copter I am very much looking forward to cutting off a perfectly good press-fit connector and soldering directly to a tiny, fragile, expensive board. Thanks, Obama. But now I know where the connections go. I hope that Vcc is +5v Speaking of part diagrams, say I want to install a mouse-based optical flow sensor. Here is a diagram:  Do you reckon I can use B3 for the purple one and the power/ground? A3 is busy. Also SCK and SCLK are the same, right? DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 28, 2015 23:44
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Sorry, my bad. I should have said, "that is not a guide for the version of APM that the makers of the CX-20 used." I will solder the telemetry and see if it works. If it works, I'm installing a mouse sensor. Do you think I can use the B3 pins on the CX-20 board where the APM diagram calls for A-3? DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 02:54
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If you were thinking about building something large and covered with sensors and telemetry for stabilization and wanted also to put a big heavy zoom lens camera on it and just have it loiter in the sky and look at things - not move around much but also be able to maintain position in the wind, what kind of motors would you use?
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Oct 1, 2015 21:51
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CrazyLittle posted:A long stick. That's the thing I keep coming back to. My interest in flight drones would be well-satisfied by a kite and a camera. But it's hard to get something as heavy as a camera aloft. I tried back in the 90's when disposable waterproof film cameras were a thing. They can't get off the ground. A kite big enough to float a camera would probably need like 6 people to launch. As for DJI / NAZA , I will not use a thing that someone else can turn off without my permission. Long poles are a hobby of mine. The best I can do is shimmying up a white pine. They drop their lower limbs regularly, unlike cedar species which retain dead branches and require underbrushing. White pines can grow to be more than 70 meters tall and are an ideal place to put a camera - if you never want to get higher than 80 meters. (And aren't terrified of climbing up trees like a normal, sane person). Flight drones are the best way for looking at stuff. Let's say my flight drone gets pretty good at staying on target due to a combination of gps and a mouse-based flow sensor. What kind of software would you need for an APM drone to communicate with an android (or other) phone about gps coordinates for "follow me" purposes? DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 04:11
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I would be very interested in reading your friend's blog and/or website.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:38
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Generally speaking, are larger diameter props on equally larger motors more efficient in terms of battery life / flight time than an equivalent amount of lifting capacity from smaller props spinning faster?
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Oct 4, 2015 05:59
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That's really cool. How'd you learn you could modify the board like that?
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Oct 12, 2015 05:35
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Elendil004 posted:Best comment on todays debacle press conference: My JJRC H8C flew away from me about a month ago. It was too high up and I couldn't tell which way it was pointed and I mistook a wind change for "forward". It just vanished. Is there a number I can call and make someone find my drone for me?
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Oct 20, 2015 04:25
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Considering that even cell-phone jammers are illegal in the civilized world, gps jamming can't be allowed either. Besides it's pointless. GPS is convenient, but losing it isn't crippling to aircraft navigation. Even a lovely little cessna 152 is equipped with a whole suite of IFR navigation aids. GPS is more convenient to use than VOR, but if a whole bunch of assholes around me start putting up drone defenders, I'm just going to solder yet another sensor onto my flight drone.
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Oct 20, 2015 15:59
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I certainly don't. But even if the FFC goes bonkers and lets everyone put a jammer on the roof of their pickup truck, there's still going to be dudes who'll go hog wild with mouse sensors, sonar, lidar. Right now the only reason such technologies are important (to me) is because gps is not sufficiently precise for my requirements. If gps were suddenly unavailable, I would still fly, but I'd have to spend more money on more parts first. That's all the drone defender can do. It can waste money. It serves no other purpose.
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Oct 20, 2015 23:14
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I am looking for maple trees among other trees.
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Oct 20, 2015 23:57
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ImplicitAssembler posted:Maybe look into a RTK solution? This looks fantastic. High precision locating based on known fixed-position ground stations. I don't really care where I am, just where all my poo poo is relative to all my other poo poo. Kinesthesia. Coupled with lateral distance sensors, I would (like to) pair up a (number of) drone(s) to a single ground station, have them fly about, look at trees, and share data about obstacles (tree trunks/limbs) with one another and create a mutually shared 3D map of safe-to-fly areas over time. A Yolo Wizard posted:Oh my god dreadllama Based on this video, my goals do not seem impossible. Merely complicated.
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Oct 21, 2015 03:21
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What's the closest thing to an fpv camera that I can put on the front of my drone that feeds data into the flight controller instead into a screen that I look at? edit: Holy poo poo that is some good footage. Also, how much is weed worth in Oklahoma that you'd be willing to risk what looks to be phantom on smuggling it?
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Oct 27, 2015 05:30
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Mister Sinewave posted:Personally I think it should be perfectly legal to fly anywhere, but also 100% OK to shoot them down. It'll all balance out in the end, is win-win! I am 100% OK with this with the attached rider that doing immediately incurs a financial penalty equal to the cost of replacing the drone owed to the injured party payable by the shooter in the event that the drone was not over the drone shooter's property at the time it was shot. DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 04:16
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I do not know or care about suburbia. Every day during the Summer, starting from June 30 onward, I must tolerate the potential presence of assholes in boats. They arrive at all hours of day and are often loud. They are there for "bass fishing," with their loud buzzing two stroke motors, stank-rear end fish guts, and as often as not, alcohol and stale urine. If I can endure their presence, they can endure the presence of my flight drone. Public space is public. DreadLlama fucked around with this message at 04:50 on Oct 28, 2015 |
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Oct 28, 2015 04:41
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B, b-but that would be like g-getting along!
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Oct 30, 2015 05:51
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I just stumbled across a youtube video for some useful-looking software. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R8WhMPl-54 I don't know how it works without a rangefinder mounted co-axially with the camera, but the idea is you send it up and it takes pictures of poo poo and turns it into a 3D model you can examine at leisure after your flight drone lands. This beats the pants off pausing/restarting 1 frame at a time to eke all the information possible out of each video taken. If this program can remember where it's been and allow you to stitch together data from multiple flights, it should be possible to map out an arbitrarily large area. In personal practical terms this means that I personally can not only map out where exactly all my trees are, but determine the optimal path through the woods to lay pex tube in the forest, and calculate exactly how much I need to buy. This is huge. But it's DJI only. It seems like something APM should be able to do though. Is there a menu dropdown I might have overlooked?
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Nov 1, 2015 18:28
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I have found the sensor I need. Intel® RealSense™. Here it is on a drone: Here is a video: http://www.asctec.de/en/uav-uas-drones-rpas-roav/asctec-firefly/ Here are some words: Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) are making drones more independent. They have demonstrated a small drone that can build its own 3-D map of an unfamiliar environment with minimal help from a human operator, and then plan its own routes around a space and its obstacles autonomously. Here is another video: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space?language=en#t-641124 The technology I require already exists. But I can not find it available on E-bay. Where is the best source for fully autonomous / intelligent flight drone parts? For the record, I live way the gently caress up north. If anyone ever sees my flight drone, they are trespassing. Your laws suck and I feel bad for you. Would any of you like to come up North and use your drones to find Maple Trees for me? I have real genuine need of tree location services. But since I can't pay anyone, it'd be more of a "for fun" trip for you and your drone. I've 60ish acres you can fly over, free of charge. Only caveat is I get a copy of your video.
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Nov 11, 2015 04:51
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I hope those are wasps or hornets and not bees.
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Nov 21, 2015 21:03
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Dude, did you just say you're going to make your own flight controller?
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Nov 22, 2015 02:33
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Combat Pretzel posted:Well, "make" as in writing my own software. The microcontroller platform is an Arduino with an 48MHz Cortex-M0 CPU and a 10-DOF IMU on a break-out board. With the exception of GPS navigation and RTL, it's essentially just a bunch of PID controllers and thus not that hard (some programming experience assumed). Filtering the sensors can be more or less of an issue, depending on what filters you want to use (i.e. mathematical complexity). Can you please put a gopro on you and upload it to youtube?
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Nov 28, 2015 04:22
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Elendil004 posted:Remember we've seen assaults on both drone operators and drones. I've been verbally accosted by more than a few people who I would really worry about having my home address. Could you explain the rationale behind these attacks. I have never heard of such a thing happening and frankly find it somewhat incredible.
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Jan 2, 2016 07:28
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