More cheap drones on the horizon

I have noticed that these have started to show up in the maker community stores. This is exciting since A-I own a couple and B-they are compatible with the hardware I use for the HCD.
I actually started work on the radio interface for the HCD using one of these.
I find them less easy to fly and they have less load capacity but they have a cool flip feature that let's the quad do a flip just by sending a command.
If these takes on I plan to expand the HCD library (NOTE: not currently compatible with this model) to control these too..

Data visualizer for drone tracker

I needed a way to visualize the spatial data from the drone tracking software. I wrote a OpenFrameworks program to do this. Click here or on image to see it in action.

Did a hover test

Here is a video of the test

Tangible paramter tuning thingy

When tuning PID parameters for the HCD flight controller I pretty much spend 2 evenings waiting for the program to recompile.
I would change some parameter a tiny bit, recompile, get the HCD in the air to evaluate and then repeat the process over and over.
At some point I realized that tuning the parameters in mid-air would be much more efficient.
For this i made this simple controller:

It's simply 6 faders hooked up to an Arduino. It transmits the 6 fader values to the flight controller software where they are scaled to the appropriate range and fed into the feedback controller in real time.

The loop has been closed

After a lot of crashing and swearing in the lair closed-loop control of the HCDs has now been achieved!!
The rough control parameters has been established so autonomous take off, flight and landing can be continously reproduced.
Now I need to fine tune the flight controller software and package everything nicely into something others can use too.

Video

Fly by wire

Hooked a HCD handset up to an Arduino to send raw joystick values to my tracking software.

The tracking software then sent the joystick commands via. another Arduino with a BK2421 radio to a HCD.

This tells me that my tracking software is able to control a Quadcopter (for now with a little help from a pilot).

Next step is to create a control-loop that will enable me to fly one or more Quadrotors under complete software control.

Here is a video of one of the first tests.

Tracking flying quadcopter

Made some tracking software to track the HCD's. Click here or on picture for video.
The tracker is made using Kinect and OpenFrameworks. I use the Kinects color video image to track orientations and the depth camera for altitude.

The tracker locks on to colored tags made from pink post-it notes and use their position to select which part of the depth information is relevant.
It's all very experimental at the moment but seems promising.
The aim is to autonomously fly one or more HCD's in formation.

Controlling toy quadcopter(s) with Arduino

The last couple of days I have done some more work on the small toy quadcopters (now dubbed HCD for Hamster Cage Drone). The goal was to hack the communication so that they could be controlled using computer vision software. Basically the poor mans version of this (don't bother you have already seen it).

UPDATE: Use this modified code to be compatoble with SparkFuns NRF24L01 radio.

UPDATE: I have made a Arduino library for controlling this particular Quadrotor (may work with similar products). You will need to build this simple hardware (discribed on this page) to use the library. All parts (apart from Arduino) may be found inside the remote controller that comes with the quadcopter.

The first thing I did was to take the remote control handset apart to see what kind of radio system was used.

 Inside was pretty much what you'd expect. A couple of cheap paper PCB's with not a lot on them.

The radio communication is handled by a small discrete radio module. After a lot of internet digging it turned out that the module was based on the BK2421 2.4GHz tranceiver IC. This also seem to be the choice for a lot of cheap RC toys coming out now.

With a datasheet for this chip and an oscilloscope it was simple enough to figure out the pin configuration for the SPI communication between the radio module and the handset.

Using an ArduinoUNO to eavesdrop on this comunication I was able to figure out the initialization and thereby the mode of communication. Here is a annotated list of the initialization sequence.

Without going into detail about the low level communication the following happen when the handset and
Quadcopter are turned on:
1) Handset broadcast it's unique network address or ID.
2) Quadcopter receives the broadcast it acknowledges this and start listening to data from that ID.
3) Upon acknowledge the handset then start transmitting flying data packet every 20 mS.

Multible Quadcopters can be controlled simultaneously by assigning them different addresses.
The passing of ID is done on one fixed radio channel and flying data is sent on one of about 12 random radio channels. The quadrotors seem to auto scan the radio channels until they find data.

Flying data is transmitted as 8 byte packets in following format:
Byte 0 = throttle 0-255
Byte 1 =Yaw 0-255
Byte 2 =Yaw_trim 0-128
Byte 3 = Pitch 0-255
Byte 4 = Roll 0-255
Byte 5 = Pitch_trim 0-128
Byte 6 = Roll_trim 0-128
Byte 7 = Fly/run 0=fly, 16=run (toggle button on handset)

Next I created a base station that would connect to the quadrotors. I happened to have some RFM-70 modules that contain the same BK2421 chip. Not reading the datasheet properly I initially thought that this module required 3.3V logic and hence all the resistors. They are not needed since the BK2421 has 5V tolerant data pins.

NOTE: CE goes to pin 8 (missing on drawing)

I eventually ended up with a much simpler set-up using just the module salvaged from the handset and an Arduino.
To enable future experimentation I have written a Arduino library for connecting to one or more of these quadcopters.
The library should work on any ATMEGA88 to ATMEGA328P based Arduino boards.
If you want to have a go yourself you may get the HCD's here or here among other places. These are just random hits on google, you may get them elsewhere.

Less crappy video here.


Please share if you find other toys that may be hacked using similar methods.
Happy hacking.

Fun with cheap toy quadcopters

Got a whole bunch of these from an art festival I was involved in.

I have now started using them for all kinds of fun projects.
The first experiment was to remove the cage. Without the cage the little quads are really stable and capable of carrying a lot of weight.
Obviously i HAD to add a small wirerless camera. Here is the first result:

I am also hacking the communication protocol so that they may be controlled from a computer but more about that in later posts.

DIY active anti corrosion system

I'm part of Illutron. We have our main workshop at a large steel barge and we are always worried about corrosion.

Since we could not afford to have the barge sand blasted and painted we looked into other options.

Cathodic protection is a process where you actively impress an electric current between a ships hull and some anode. The replaceable anode is then corroded in place of the ship and everybody is happy.

The Anode may be any large clump of metal submerged next to the ship, e.g. an old engine block. We use 3 meters of rail track.

A variable voltage between 0 and 1.5V and a current between 0 and 10A is required.

For this I designed a simple power supply circuit:

Mains is first converted to 12V using an efficient industrial switch mode power supply. A low frequency Buck converter (low frequency=low switching loss) then lower the voltage further under microcontroller control.

Low frequency switching require a rather large inductor. The transformer like object in the picture below is a 55mH(1) inductor (schematic says 100, not critical) for the Buck converter. If you want to build this you may use the primary of an old microwave transformer (remove secondary!!).

( 1: used to say micro-Henry it need to say mili-Henry. Thanks Fred )

The microcontroller measures the output current and voltage and displays them on a standard 2x16 chr. LCD. I used an Arduino and connected the LCD according to the Arduino LCD example.

I use the somewhat exotic BTN7970 as H-bridge driver for the Buck converter. This offer very low switching losses but could be replaced by your favorite choice of H-bridge device.

The Arduino code implements the following functions:

By pressing the switches you can adjust the voltage in small steps. Press both switches to lock the keys from unintended access, press both again to unlock.
Up-time is displayed and a clearable message appears if the unit have been power-cycled.

Does it work? 

Yes!

These two mild steel plates was submerged next to the barge. The left is isolated from the hull and the right is electrically connected to it.

This picture is taken after two days.

A WORD OF WARNING:

If you attempt to use this system on your own ship/structure you need to know what you are doing. Reversing the polarity result in the ship being corroded super-fast and running too much current result in calcium build up on the hull potentially stripping off existing paint.

You need to measure the corrosion potential and adjust the voltage accordingly.

You may use the following method if you are careful:

Connect a piece of blank steel to the hull with a beefy bable. Slowly increase the voltage over several days until the steel stays blank. Clean the steel between inspections with steel wool.
Good luck.

Diy Arduino based metal detector.

UPDATE: Try using BC547 as transistor people have reported problems with 2n2222.

Me and my son decided to go treasure hunting with a metal detector that we have but we couldn't find it anywhere. Being proper makers we decided that it would be more fun to build one ourselves rather than keep trying to find it. 

Most metal detectors uses a search coil that act as part of an oscillator circuit. When metal is put in proximity of the search coil the frequency of the oscilations changes.

Many metal detectors (including the one we can't find) uses another more stable oscillator BFO (beat frequency oscillator) to act as a reference for the frequency of the search coil. Usually the frequency of the BFO is adjusted to exactly match that of the search coil oscillator when no metal is present near this.
The signals from these two oscillators are then fed to a, usually analog, circuit that create an output proportionally to the difference in frequency og the two. This may be either an audiable tone and/or some meter reading.
Another device that are really good at detecting minute frequency changes is a microcontroller. We decided to swap the BFO approach for a microcontroller and came up with following simple circuit:

The oscillator circuit feeds a around 160kHz signal to pin 5 of the Arduino. The Arduino sketch then measures the frequency of this pin very accurately. When the 'NULL SW.' button is held this frequency is stored. Any deviation from this frequency is then represented as a series of 'geiger counter' clicks on the piezo. The rate of the clicks increases as metal approaches the coil.

We tried different search coils and found that around 30 turns of wirer around a 15cm. plastic bucket worked well.

All we needed then was to tie it all to a discarded Ikea lamp and hey-presto off to the beach to find treasures.
The metal detector has excellent sensitivity and by changing the SENSITIVITY value in the Arduino sketch you are able to tune it for both small and large objects.
Here is the source code if you want to build one yourself.
Happy hunting!

Quick and dirty replacement of number plate lights

My car is a "recreational vehicle". It was given to me by a friend to scrap but it has turned into a project to keep it running at minimal cost.

The other night I noticed that the humber plate lights wasn't working (bulbs was blown years ago). It was late so I gave myself 10 minutes to solve the problem.

It turned out that a piece of un-etched PCB would fit directly into the bulb sockets. After a quick fr

eehand scribble with the Dremel I was able to solder a couple of LEDs and resistors to the board. After securing everything with hot-glue everything with hot glue the bulb-replacements was ready.

 

More Giant CNC build pictures

More Giant CNC build pictures, a set on Flickr.

Had some problems with the CNC loosing steps but eventually solved this and it now runs great.
Installed a new computer and got some new and more powerful parts for the next model.