In my last article I introduced the new NG hardware 0.20 and showed first Gerber files of it. In the meanwhile our board producer was busy creating the new boards.
Today the first prototype boards have arrived! But see for yourself...
The panel packet:
The topside of the panel:
And the backside of the panel:
The boards look great! The next days will show how they perform!
Hi, Amir
I have been flying (when the weather here in the UK allows) a quadrocopter using the I.R. levelled Spectrolutions board.
The machine is too affected by the vagaries of the weather and I am considering changing the board to the UAVP board which is using accelerometer levelling.
My questions are (a) what advantages do your new boards offer over the existing fully populated boards? and (b) are any of the UAVP boards capable of being position stabilised by GPS?
Thank you
- Ted, Northwich Cheshire UK
Hi Ted,
There are a lot of points where a NG is superior to an UAVP. It has a closed-loop control running at 1kHz instad of 100Hz of an UAVP. It uses a CPU with a lot more processing power, has more RAM and FLASH and so is able to implement a lot more features than an UAVP. That starts with several console shells having help, Emacs key bindings and command completion and ends with multiple closed-loop control algorithms in the same code, ACT DSL support, Behavior control, GPS and a lot more.
Be sure to read my previous posts concerning the NG to find out more!
Yes, GPS will be supported but currently is not. The old HW-0.10 did not have a fully functional compass sensor on-board and without one GPS navigation is nearly impossible. The new HW-0.20 will hopefully support a GPS controller soon.
Regards
- Amir
Many thanks, Amir for your reply. It is appreciated.
I suppose my problem is that I really do not understand the complex maths behind the project and really want a system with which I can maybe replace my existing board which is situated in a more or less standard set-up ie aluminium cross frame with 4 brushless motors running 2 clockwise and 2 anti clockwise rotors. These rotors are driven via standard ESC's directly from standard plug in connectors on the board.
Do you envisage that your system will ever get to the stage where I, with my limited expertise, could use your board (or easily build it and use it in my system?) oh and the fact that your processor is running at a higher speed - would that mean that it would be necessary to use I2C for data transfer and thus specialised ESC's?
Cheers Ted
Hi Ted,
We hope to reach a state, where we can release to the general public. Currently we are testing the next hardware for faults and then we will start to port the firmware to the new hardware. Having reached that point the hardware will have stabilized and we will think about a release. We also started writing documentation for that day.
Regards
- Amir
Amazing project, Amir
Thank you for the update - I will follow your progress very carefully
Cheers Ted