8bitbanger
New Member
Hi Folks -
Our group is looking for a platform to build our EE senior design project on. Our biggest constraint is cost, as it must be under the $200 mark; lower cost the better of course,
None of us are experienced with quad-rotor copters, or RC flight in general, so we are looking for a kit that can provide semi-RTF (frame, motors, rotors, etc) as well as a basic controller(as small as possible) that allows for:
1)basic high level control of motors (as in either us provide waypoint, or move this direction this distance at this speed, etc)
2)return to home/safe land functionality (so GPS minimal) would be nice, but I guess if we can monitor battery and provide waypoints, we could always embed this functionality into our control system
3)an open/accessible hardware/software interface that can allows us to provide the mentioned on-the-fly waypoints, access to the GPS data, etc. This will be for sake of argument autonomous, thought we will likely have some sort of emergency/failsafe RF link.
I see that there is an interface called MAVLink, but it's not immediately clear if this will cover all the onboard communication we desire.
The other big requirement is that the frame must be big/open enough to attaching (even if only temporarily) an embedded platform (Rasberry pi, beaglebone, etc) along with perhaps another 5x5" sized board on top. This will eventually be all combined into a single board, but for testing...
My best guess with the above boards and an auxiliary battery is maybe 2lbs/1kilo or so.
Flight time is not a huge concern, as this is for proof-of-concept, but minimum 6-7+ minutes.
Any thoughts? Thank you for any suggestions! We're very excited to get started, and will certainly give more fun details once we get going!
Best,
James
Our group is looking for a platform to build our EE senior design project on. Our biggest constraint is cost, as it must be under the $200 mark; lower cost the better of course,
None of us are experienced with quad-rotor copters, or RC flight in general, so we are looking for a kit that can provide semi-RTF (frame, motors, rotors, etc) as well as a basic controller(as small as possible) that allows for:
1)basic high level control of motors (as in either us provide waypoint, or move this direction this distance at this speed, etc)
2)return to home/safe land functionality (so GPS minimal) would be nice, but I guess if we can monitor battery and provide waypoints, we could always embed this functionality into our control system
3)an open/accessible hardware/software interface that can allows us to provide the mentioned on-the-fly waypoints, access to the GPS data, etc. This will be for sake of argument autonomous, thought we will likely have some sort of emergency/failsafe RF link.
I see that there is an interface called MAVLink, but it's not immediately clear if this will cover all the onboard communication we desire.
The other big requirement is that the frame must be big/open enough to attaching (even if only temporarily) an embedded platform (Rasberry pi, beaglebone, etc) along with perhaps another 5x5" sized board on top. This will eventually be all combined into a single board, but for testing...
My best guess with the above boards and an auxiliary battery is maybe 2lbs/1kilo or so.
Flight time is not a huge concern, as this is for proof-of-concept, but minimum 6-7+ minutes.
Any thoughts? Thank you for any suggestions! We're very excited to get started, and will certainly give more fun details once we get going!
Best,
James
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