Here’s a little end-of-November update on progress.
- above is the video of Leonard flying the vehicle at the AP dev conference in Richmond
- Somewhat surprisingly the GPS issue appears to be a power issue rather than an EMI issue. During the investigation we used UBlox’s built-in MON/SPAN message and we did see some interference from the carrier board but the larger issue appears to be that the carrier board (being developed with Running Electronics) was powering all the CAN and serial ports from the Cube’s 5V peripheral power pin which only provides up to 1amp which is apparently too little to power the Here4 and 2x benewake lidar at least during startup. In the next version of the board, the Here4 will be powered all on its own by the Cube’s “high power” 5V and the lidar will be powered by the board’s main 5V/10amp regulator
- The BMS dev board (being developed with VimDrones) used an SPI connection to the TI-BQ76952 chip but we found it was quite difficult to work with so a new dev board is being produced that uses I2C
- Re 3D printing, one of our prototype’s arms broke during vibration testing. Based on some great advice from a Japanese company called Boduk we think that our bamboo printer’s carbon fibre print doesn’t have enough vertical strength so we’re going to get some professional prints done using MFJ (mult-jet-fusion) and PA12 Nylon.
- An ArduPilot community member provided a contact at a Taiwanese camera manufacturer and it looks like I may be able to get a camera that fits within an XFRobot or CADDX gimbal but also connects directly to the RPI CM companion computer. This would be a huge advance because it would reduce latency and give us full control over the camera. This is still very much in the early prototype stages though so no promises!
Thanks very much for the comments and advice above, I’m of course reading every word of it!