Hello again!

For once, not that much time passed since my last post. Which is a good thing! It helps me to concentrate on the real news... ;)

So, let's see... The UAVP-NG team was meeting at the 30. Chaos Communication Congress 30C3 in Hamburg. The congress gets organized by the Chaos Computer Club, one of the oldest hacker clubs of the worlds. As every year, it was a great event with numerious interesting talks and workshops.

Our team built a small UAVP-NG assembly at the 30c3. We showed our different copter hardwares, did a lot of software and hardware hacking and had many interesting discussions.

Volker - one of our hardware head developers - brought with him the first assembled HW-0.30-r0 prototype which you can see Volker presenting here at the 30c3 assembly in Hamburg.

This is the first prototype of our new STM32F4 based HW-0.3x hardware family. It's feature list is impressive and I will introduce you to it's features further on.

Most of our head developers showed up to the 30c3 meeting and we did a lot of NGOS hacking to get our newest hardware airborne. Several small bugs on the PCB had to be fixed and Volker, Ben, Martin and several others did a great job in tracing the problems of our newest prototype.

Christi brought with him his new styropor oktocopter which he flew inside of the 30c3 hackcenter.

Shortly after 30c3 the UAVP-NG core team meet in Zurich, Switzerland for a hacking weekend. There we finished the last hard- and software fixes for HW-0.30-r0 and did the first maidenflight of the new hardware prototype.

In the days since the maidenflight our hardware developers prepared HW-0.30-r1 and we produced a first batch of the new boards, accompanying breakout boards for switches and a JTAG adapter as well as a new NGusb-v2 which supports 6-pin RTS/CTS connections with flow-control and 4-pin UART connections without.

The new PCBs have arrived from the fab and look great. Here you see the top-side of the brand new HW-0.30-r1 PCB in 6 layer:

And this is the bottom-side of the board:

As you can see, the new hardware sports two STM32F4 CPUs coupled by a dual-port RAM, shared by the two CPU.

Here's a short overview of the features:

• 80x80mm FC PCB
• 2x STM32F407IGT6, ARM M4 MCU, 1024kb Flash, 168Mhz, 192kB SRAM
• IDT70V261 Dual-Port RAM, 16KB x 16
• 2x TJA1051T High-speed CAN transceiver, 1Mbps
• USB2514B 4 Port, Low-Power, Full-Featured, Full-Speed USB 2.0 compliant hub
• LTC2950 Push Button Controller
• Micro SD card slot
• 4x Servo Control PPM Output
• 4x UART Input (2x with RTS/CTS)
• 1x Telemetry Input
• 2x ADC Input (for external Sensors like IR, US)
• On-board JTAG Adapter
• MPU6000 3D Gyro + Accelerometer
• LIS3LV02DQ 3-Axis Accelerometer
• HMC5883L 3-Axis Compass
• MS5607B Altimeter Module

In the next weeks we will assemble some of the new PCB and test them throughly. Should everything be fine, the new PCBs will show up in the UAVP-NG Shop.