Robotic microhelicopter tutorial

Try

't remember if theirs is a 4DOF or 6DOF.

Insanely cool!

Do you envision this eventually being fly-by-wire, or will the usual helicopter flying skills be required?

-- Gordon

Very nice!

Check these guys - looks like just the ticket:

-Brian

May be a bit big

the version without the sockets would be small enough

Have you had any problems with control latency with Bluetooth? I've found that it is difficult to fly helicopters with a few ms of delay in the servos.

I'm partial to the Rotomotion unit, since I designed it. It also has a servo controller and radio interface, which could replace some of your existing components.

The autopilot.sf.net project has source code for the Rotomotion IMU and a complete hovering flight controller. Hopefully that will help you make quick progress with your project.

Trammell

Indeed a basic PWM remote should have 10 ms average latency from transmitter to servo, whereas my current setup has

20 ms on the Bluetooth link, plus 10 ms to the servos. As far as manual control is concerned, I can't tell the difference between "very hard" and "extremely hard" anyway. And for computer-controlled flight I know the servos will tolerate being refreshed much faster than 50 Hz if needed.

Yes I am aware that Autopilot and Rotomotion are very popular. BTW another Pascal Brisset is using portions of Autopilot in the Paparazzi UAV project - I would like to clarify that I am someone else.

-- Pascal (Paris, France)

Pascal,

You might want to use your middle initial to differentiate yourself from the other person especially in an english speaking environment such as this one and especially the other person seems to have similar interest as yours.

As regards to the IMU, we recently bought an IMU from microstrain. The package is definitely weightier than your requirements but it may just a question to remove the plastic part of it. We got the 3dm-gx1 but there are others:

Igor.