tinkering is our passion

It’s time for a little situation report.
While working on openmulticopter I totally forgot to post here. The last few weeks we decided what gyros we’ll use and how to “distribute” the power, I bought an EAGLE non-profit license and we made a lot of drawing in the schematic.

I don’t really have the time or “desire” to write too much, so, long story short, click on more to see the rest.
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Hi guys!

It’s been quite a while… There was a lot going on the last two months. Patrick just started his study at the ETH Zürich and me (Jonas) just started the study at the university of applied sciences in Burgdorf.
I got some time to write a post, eventually.

I just wanted to tell you that we started the development on openmulticopter. This means that you will find constant updates on schematics and layouts in the documentation section on openmulticopter.org and github.

Since, the first semester at the university is going to end soon there will be a lot of exams I have to write and therefore I probably don’t have a lot of time left to work on openmulticopter. Hope you understand.

But in the meantime I will do some testing of new components like gyros and accelerometers and I’ll try to keep you posted.

Today I need to announce something that will probably be astonishing for many of you who have been following our blog for a while.

Jonas and me decided to leave the UAVP NG project with immediate effect.

During the last weeks we felt that a lot of our initial enthusiasm we brought to the project a year ago had vanished. We can’t say how this could happen and we are very sorry things turned out to be what they are now. Additionally, recent events and discussions among the NG developers about free/open software and hardware as well as public development models and discussions also showed us that our beliefs and opinions didn’t correspond with those practiced in the UAVP NG project.

I know that a few people are deeply frustrated and displeased by our decision and we’re awfully sorry about that. We never meant to affront you.

I still believe that the UAVP NG hardware and software is a fantastic quad-/multicopter platform that has the potential to push the limits even further and challenge other projects. Maybe, someday there will be the long announced and awaited open source release and I’m looking forward to having another look at the source code and the hardware designs then.

As to our own plans for the future with quadcopters and flying objects, we’re happy to announce some good news:

Together with esden (read his blog post about OMC here), who founded the open-bldc project, and some other open-source enthusiasts, Jonas and me started a new project called Open- Multicopter. It intends to be the first project ever to create a completely free/libre and open source community multicopter platform. Everything will be released under appropriate FLOSS licenses and the development process will be transparent and open, effectively allowing anyone to contribute. Join our mailing lists or visit our freenode IRC channel #openmulticopter, if you’re interested in helping us.

Patrick

When you’re sitting in school all day long, you wonder if there is something else you could do to get the time pass by faster. Since, I will be attending the University of Applied Sciences in fall later this year, I thought it would be nice if I had an app for my iPhone where I can look up a formula or even the theory about a specific component in no time at all. I knew it would be an awful bit of work I had to do. But that didn’t stop me!

I’m a real newbie in programming for the iPhone. However, I saw this app as an oppertunity to learn the language and to get some practice in object oriented programming. Here are some first screenshots.

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In my last post I told you about my mysterious problems with one of my MK BL-Ctrls. As you might remember one of my four BL-Ctrl boards refused to work and signalled an error at phase B. After trying to solve the error by resoldering some parts on the board I ordered a replacement and marked the affected ESC as defective. When I took my brushless controllers out of my drawer this week I noticed that one of them showed the same error at phase B. Although I was pretty sure I didn’t swap the two ESCs by mistake I still thought this would be the case, since the BL-Ctrl marked as defective suddenly didn’t show the error any more. So I soldered all the cables to that BL-Ctrl again, flashed the newest software and hooked it up to one of my motors. Guess what! It showed that same error again – argh!

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