Collaborate Disseminate
Sometimes bad software is all that is holding good hardware back. [Michael Melchior] wanted to scavenge some motors and propellers for another project, so he bought an inexpensive quadcopter intending …read more Continue reading Taking Reverse Engineering to the Skies: Cheap Drone Gets PX4 Autopilot
There are a few open source autopilots available these days for quadcopters and fixed wing aircraft. Two of the most popular are ArduPilot and PX4, however neither is officially capable of working with unpowered aircraft. Despite this, [rctestflight] decided to run some experiments to see just how PX4 would fare …read more
Continue reading Running a Glider With The PX4 Flight Controller
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a flying machine that could maneuver in any direction while rotating around any axis while maintaining both thrust and torque? Attach a robot arm and the machine could position itself anywhere and move objects around as needed. [Dario Brescianini] and [Raffaello D’Andrea] of the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich, have come up with their Omnicopter that does just that using eight rotors in configurations that give it six degrees of freedom. Oh, and it plays fetch, as shown in the first video below.
Each propeller is reversible to provide …read more
Continue reading A Flying, Fetching, Helping-Hand Omnicopter