Quadrocopters anyone?

[Skeksis]

Has anyone looked into building quadrocopters or thought about the suitability of Xmos boards for such a project? I did have a gander around the forum quickly but saw nothing XCore related aside from the UAV group and rp181's Helicopter Autopilot, I'd be very interested to hear about any flight projects some of you may have in development.

[rp181]

I did work on quad code for while, but other projects took hold. I just suck with the math too much for the kalman filter/DCM filter. One day, i've got to figure it out :)

I do have all the sensors, and even did a protoboard (3x gyros, 3 axis accel, mag, barometric pressure sensor), and have a quad design already (CAD, made one for someone else). XMOS is an excellent choice, it could blow what other people use out of the water.

EDIT: The board was an XC-1A shield, which, if i remember, worked fine except for the header being flipped (easy fix).

[ale500]

I was looking yesterday at the Motor control board schematics. One L1 is used to control 2 brushless 100W motors. While quadcopters tend to have way smaller motors, the logic is already there. A small two motor board with everything needed and booted via XLINK would be quite interesting. A G4 device could hold the whole system though.

[rp181]

Even a G4, i think, would be overkill. People do this with things like an arduino, so a single L1-128 should be sufficient. A good design would be to have 1 thread act as the AHRS, and output roll,pitch,yaw,x,y, and z. Another thread can figure out how to use this data, and control the motors. Other threads can be things like comms, logging, etc.

Also, boards for a G4 get to be very complicated/expensive (unless you planned on using the XC-1A).

EDIT: ADXRS642 seems like a good gyro to use. I am working on an XMOS board now for work, and a modified version should make a very good board.

[Skeksis]

Thanks for replying guys,

rp181: I know that you mean about projects overlapping, I've been tripping over myself thinking of things to do with my board since I got the thing. I'm just going through all of the information you put up, the board you posted on your final update looks pretty damned shiny. Did you succeed in progressing any further with the build after that update?

If I do end up building something it'll be on the XC-1A, I imagine it'll eat through a battery like mad though.

[rp181]

Yep, that's about how far I got. What the picture doesn't show is the whole mess of little red wires to fix it ;)

[Skeksis]

Haha, a tactical photo then :P You shouldn't have said anything

[ale500]

The XC-1 needs a couple of watts... the motors otoh need plenty, specially 4 of them! Once it works in the G4 it may be trimmed to fit a lower power L2 or L1.