OpenPilot
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.