DUBwise UI over time

Today I got some amazing images for DUBwise for UAVTalk from a really cool and professional guy called grass man which enabled me to make DUBwise for UAVTalk look really sweet:

I am working on the mother project DUBwise since 2007 and this is the first time I like the appearance of it. I always had the problem that I cannot simply take free images of the web as DUBwise has this crude (but important for me ) non-military creative-commons licence-construct. Anyway seeing my baby in such a glance today inspired me to look back a bit. Starting with a small step back in time:

The above screen was the state after I came back from my trip around the world I tested all these shiny new UI Patterns like the popular pagers / dashboard / actionbar - was not feeling bad but needed attention from GFX-Pro's e.g. the connection indicator was just a drawColor ( green or red ) - the rest are images that "fit" which i took with my IXUS 80 - and my IXUS is much more like flying and taking pictures like these :-)
But it gets even worse. In Android beginning I did most stuff with ListViews and icons from android.R.drawable:

Now with big steps deep into the dark J2ME area. There I did nearly everything via an LCD+4way-input style interface but with light and dark theming - voice output and a lot of nifty useful things:

and finally this is the very beginning - just plain text writing values from the UAS ( MK at this time ) and the insight that the RC and the Mobile belong together:

Project Voyager

For my backpacking trip I was in the need for a new kopter. My old one was too cumbersome for transport and not reliable enough because I crashed it a lot when testing software or by brutal fun flying. At home this was no problem, but on the trip I can only carry few tools and spare parts. I decided to build an koax y6 because:

• is good collapsable
• has some redundancy
• has good orientation visibility

On my trip there where minimum 5 flights with a plane planned. And I know that they sometimes handle the baggage

very roughly, so I had to build a good case. I decided to use an KG tube which is normally used to transport fecals under the earth. These tubes are available in DIY superstores, but not in the size I needed them. My centerplate

is 180mm so I needed the

200mm tube (they are available in 50mm steps). The maximum sized tube I found in the local DIY superstore

s where 100mm. I luckily got the tip by djrobby to look in a civil engineering shop

for tubes that size

and was lucky there. These tubes are very stable (I can even use it as a chair) but that comes with the cost of heaviness. The tube with caps for both sides weight 3.5 kg which is very heavy when you carry it some kilometers.

I call this Kopter Voyager mainly because when I collapse it - it looks like a NCC and I really like Star-Trek ;-) Beside that this Kopter is for traveling purposes and voyager reflects that very good.
Here are some aerial Pictures taken with this MK.
And Here is the ( sorry german - but you can look at the images or use google translate ) blog of this trip.

DUBwise 4 Android Screenshots

with special thanx to Stefano Sanna & Emanuele Di Saverio for the android bluetooth lib that makes it possible to use DUBwise with Android Phones < 2.0

Controlling Mikrokopter with a SpaceMouse on an OpenWrt Router

I improved my SpaceMouse MikroKopter flying setup so that it's now more practical. In the old setup for piloting the MikroKopter with a SpaceMouse ( look here) - I used my notebook for running Riddim. This mainly had 3 drawbacks:
- setup time until i can start flying with this setup was very high
- not reliable enough ( I install software and do experimental stuff on my notebook too often to believe it could be a reliable MultiKopter Controller )
- in the notebook setup piloting was only possible when sitting

In the new setup i use one openwrt router ( asus wl500g premium ) to run the riddim software:


The Datalink to the Mikrokopter is done with ZigBee Pro - which is connected over one MK-USB to the router ( later i can get rid of the MK-USB and use one of the 2 native serial ports in the router to save weigth and power).
The keyswitch to start the mikrokopter and the other switches are connected to an mini gamepad i bought for ~5Eur and took apart to connect wires.




The whole thing is powered by a 2S LiPo ( to ensure the 7805 is not getting to hot).




résumé

Pros:
- very intuitive ( you move the mouse as you want your QuadroKopter to fly )
- one free hand - only one hand needed for flying ( so you have one hand free for operating other functions, for a cigarett, a mobile phone ,a tissue , ... )
- keyswitch to start the Multikopter often lets spectator smile ;-)

Cons:
- router needs ~1min to boot ( i deactivated some stuff in the init.d allready but i have some more options left i can try like boot_wait_time, removing modules i dont need , ... - i hope i can get it ready in <30s )
- landing ( more touch down than soft at the moment with preasure sensor )
- not really suitable for acrobatic flight

credits
- xm for help on porting to openwrt
- sublab for infrastructure

Quadrokopter@GrundrechtsGeburtstag

Additional Pics from leon:

Quadrokopter + Oktokopter = Dodekakopter

Yesterday we had the Maiden-Flight of our DodekaKopter:

6km DUBwise Connection

Holger showed up with a nice improvement of the Range-Extender which gives the possibility to have more than 6km distance between the MK and the Mobile-Phone. The related Forum Post is in german, but perhaps you can see on the Pictures what it its all about ( Hint: big antenna ).

DUBwise Graph Speedup

The Sensor-Graph in DUBwise ( actual trunk ) is now much faster and the speed is adjustable:


DUBwise Graph speedup from ligi on Vimeo.

DUBwise ScreenCast Test

I am trying to make a screencast of DUBwise - this is a first result ( sorry for the poor audio ):

DUBwise screencast test from ligi on Vimeo.

Oktopussy Failsave Test

The most interesting thing about 8 Engines is that some ( up to 4 ) can fail without causing a crash. We made a little video while we tested this "Feature":


Oktopussy Failsave Test from ligi on Vimeo.

DUBwise RC-Mount

Since i build the DUBwise Range extender - there are some new usecases in which i use dubwise while the MultiKopter is in the air. For that i needed a mount that i have my hands free for flying. This is the mount i build from parts i found in my Hobby-Room ( price of parts <5$ ):









weight of 87g with sun-protection - which is very ok for mounting on the RC:

OktoPussy first Flights

Very early Flights of the OktoPussy ( the maiden flight got lost in some bad SD-Card ).



OktoPussy first Outdoor flight from ligi on Vimeo.


Specs:
- Frame ( Design & Construction by seba aka SelectaT )
- FC 1.0 ( green -soldered by Ligi) with Flight-Ctrl_MEGA644_V0_72a_Octo.hex
- 8*Bl-Ctrl 1.2 ( green soldered by Ligi)
- 4* robbe roxxy 2824-34
- 4* esky 002b
- 8x EPP1045
- 1x2100mah 3s Lipo
- lots of wires
- take-off weight ~1200g


OktoPussy from ligi on Vimeo.

Detail Pics:

DUBwise Range Extender

Finally i had some time for a Project which was in my mind a long time - the DUBwise Range extender.




The Bluetooth Modules in Mobile Phones are very limited in Range ( for reasons of power consumption and size) - which is OK for normal usage of Mobile Phones but was a problem for some use-cases of DUBwise.
The range extender is a little box for the jacket which contains one Zigbee-Pro module ; a Bluetooth Module and power supply. Zigbee and BT are crossed ( rx=>tx ; tx=>rx ).






Now I connect to the BT module in my jacket with the Mobile Phone ( which is <10m in range normaly ) and the (long) distance to the MikroKopter is Made by a ZigBee Pro connection. ( specifyed range ideally by 1mile / 1.6 km )

Beside the range there is one more advantage. I can leave ZigBee on the MK permanently - I dont have to switch between Bluetooth for DUBwise usage and ZigBee for Riddim ...

DUBwise for Android SDK 0.9-r1

I stopped working on DUBwise for Android while they kept the actual SDK secret under NDA's. Yesterday Google finally released Android SDK 0.9-r1. So i checked if the old DUBwise version could be installed on the new SDK and it didnt work - nothing else was to expect ;-) Compiling with the new SDK was blocked by 31 Errors resulting in API-Changes ( e.g. Bitmap.width() => Bitmap.getWith() ) - I fixed those Errors and then I ran into singing-issues - which could be fixxed by creating a new build.xml via activityCreator.py.
So finally DUBwise is running with the new SDK:

aerial photography

I've made some aerial photographs the last days.

Some more are shown here.
I also started a wiki page to describe the method I used ( and provide space for other methods ) to trigger the camera.

Video: AN-72 Boogie Cochstedt 2008 - Mikrokopter Perspective

Some impressions from the AN-72 Boogie, including onboard footage from a Mikrokopter. Featuring Bird Men briefings on the ground, in-plane view of exit, skydivers landing, visitors, planes (Antonov AN-28 and PINK Skyvan), and some in-plane views of the exit. A great day for all of us!

P.S. the AN-72 got stuck in Moldavia...

Video-editing by Katja the ChiliFarmer with Blender & Gimp
Camera: Kodak Z1275

Thanx to Axel from crazy-skydiving for invitation & support !-)




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

Video: First Flight of my Second MikroKopter

Now I have a new MikroKopter for Beta-Testing , Rushing around and simply having fun. My CampKopter will be a Camera Kopter for slow flights from now on.

VIdeo: SubLab QC-Action - public spacemouse flying

the first sublab quadrocopter action within the "Westbesuch" festival in leipzig. interested people could fly my quadrocopter by using a space mouse. although the flight space was very small it was funny and will be repeated - with more space of course.

DUBwise v0.45

This Weekend i had some time for DUBwise. There was an bug open with DUBwise and FC V0.69. This one is Fixed with DUBwise 0.45 in the SVN

Video: RC/Tec Meeting @ Boehlen

There was a lot of Fun at the Meeting in Boehlen. Nothing really technical new ( I was very busy working the last weeks ) - but Fun is important too !-)