In my last blog entry I presented our new HW-0.20 boards. Today I would like to show you our finished HW-0.20 prototype boards.

As you all know we were busy porting the NGOS from HW-0.10 to HW-0.20. A lot of design changes and new peripherals need to be supported while still being downward compatible to HW-0.10.

Being downward compatible allows us to release one HEX file for all existing hardware platforms. This is important since the planed Mini-NG will have a similar design as the HW-0.10. You don't need air pressure and GPS for mini Quads and Funflyers, so we will downsize the new design later on to a one-board design for fun flying.

The port of the NGOS is working fine and starts to support the new devices and different hardware platforms.

Here you can see how the NGOS detects the hardware platform it's running on:

# show version

Wolferl-NG, Version 0.42 pre-beta (non-public), Revision r2352

FC HW-ID:  FC-0.20
SB HW-ID:  SB-0.20

In the next section you can see how the NGOS probed for the available devices and then activated their associated drivers:

# show devices

Detected devices:

  Addr  Bus     Description

  0x02  ADC16   ADXRS MEMS Gyroscope 16bit (nick)
  0x03  ADC16   ADXRS MEMS Gyroscope 16bit (roll)
  0x00  ADC16   ADXRS MEMS Gyroscope 16bit (yaw)
  0x01  ADC16   ADXRS MEMS Temperature 16bit
  0x00  SPI0    LIS3LV02DQ 3-Axis Accelerometer
  0x02  SPI0    ADS1255 24bit Analog Digital Converter

As you can see, most of the new hardware gets already detected and used. The 16bit ADC does not yet show up in the device table (difficult to probe) but it's already getting used to sample the gyros.

The peripheral CPUs do not yet show eighter. Some of our developers are working hard on their firmware and we hope to integrate the peripheral CPUs soon. But there is no need to hurry with that. We are fully downward compatible and so we are able to fly even without support for the RC-controller or GPS-controller.

The new hardware was fully assembled in the meantime and it's current state looks like this:

Since most of the NGOS now is ported to the new hardware and the new peripherals are supported now, we started to build a full Quadcopter with the new HW-0.20.

The first fully assembled NG-0.20 looks like this:

Update:

Tonight we did the maiden flight of the new NG-0.20! Everything went according to plans and except for a small sign error which we fixed within minutes, it all worked very well!

But see for yourself:

Wolferl-NG: HW-0.20 is airborne! from Amir on Vimeo.

We will continue our test flights in the next days!