Sharing Knowledge

I’ve been wanted to announce this for a while as it is where a lot of my time has been going lately. Along with several other cool people I have been working on a new Free software autopilot called OpenPilot and I am very excited about how well the project is going.

I started flying UAVs a couple of years ago and have bought and flown most of the Open Source ones as well as a couple of the professional closed source ones. However, none offered all the features I wanted or forced me to use different operating systems and I seemed to spend my time working around their limits rather than flying. Additionally, I really wanted to option to be able to fly multi rotor helicopters autonomously as well as aircraft and the only platforms that appear to offer this feature are the commercial (and crazy expensive) platforms. If you can’t find what you are looking for, sometimes you have to roll up your sleeves and create it yourself and this is how OpenPilot was born.

Initially this project was started by myself and Angus Peart who is quite honestly, a genius. Working off a base schematic designed by Dr. Zik Saleeba, Angus very quickly selected state of the art components that offered a excellent price to performance ratio and designed a 4-layer PCB around them. Given the power and connectivity options this contains, it is absolutely tiny and offers a price to performance ratio that will be very hard to beat. Shortly after the project started we were joined by Vassilis Varveropoulos who is an experienced developer that has working on several UAV platforms in the past.

The hardware specification and more information can be found on the OpenPilot Wiki, given that this project is just 6 weeks old we are making amazing progress.

Space: the final frontier, we came close to it with a balloon and have pictures to prove it. The idea is to launch a weather balloon with an attached camera to try and get pictures from near space. I have Reddit to thank for this as that is where I read the original article that started off this adventure. As a tribute, the balloon was named ReHAB, this was suggested by Reddit user Maxd and stands for Reddit High Altitude Balloon.

Sure, this has been done before but in this case I wanted to make it as simple as possible and to track the balloon in real time without needing a special amateur radio license. Cost was an issue but not the primary one; I did not want to make this as cheap as possible, rather my concern was to reduce the complexity and make this easy for others to do. With that in mind I’m going to explain all the steps right down to the basic details in my next post in the hopes it helps more people launch their own near space adventure, this post will just cover the story of the launch.

“Hey, the weather looks good for Sunday” was the message that greeted me when I logged on to IRC. This was Gussy, part of the balloon team and a fullsize hotair balloon pilot so he’s good at judging the winds. I open the balloon trajectory website, put in the coordinates for Melbourne, Australia along with our balloon data and sure enough it’s perfect. As the wind is a southerly it means our balloon can be launched near the city without it going out to sea, which is great as we don’t have a boat.

Launching near the city is exactly what we wanted, firstly it means we can get interesting pictures early on in the flight and secondly as its an early morning launch, it means I can stay in bed longer. The trajectory calculator estimates a landing in the area of Shepparton, which is about 100km north of Melbourne. Its now late Thursday afternoon, this gives me Friday and Saturday to get some Helium.

Read more…

Right, erm, a blog. Now all I need is some time to update it regularly, in the mean time here’s a video.