CoaxCopter or SingleCopter with raspbery pi - possible?

ArduCopter
1

Hi to every one!

I’m rather new in all stuff about building flying drones, but I’m very very inspired and interested in that. I very need to build a flying platform for some researches, and was digging the internet for the solutions. I found different topics and forums of different communities round the world, who were building these machines. That’s how I came to you guys.

I’m an engineer, a programmer. I love linux. I really love any sort of automation. What I want very much, is to make a flying platform for some amount of sensors, and a microcomputer with linux, to work with the data that would come from them in real time.

For last half of a year I was working with a microcomputers like raspberry pi 2-3, and that is a very nice boards. Hope that you would agree with me in this. Small linux bord… cool. I hoped that it is possible to build some flying stuff with it too. I found Navio (Navio+, Navio 2, etc. ) boards and now I’m searching how to create this flying drone. The most suitable architecture for my case is CoaxialCopter or SingleCopter like on the link : single/coaxial copters

I reeeeaaly want to build my own, understand that it might cost a plenty of money, but it worths it.

I wanted to build it with raspberry pi board, and I still want. But in “Navio” comunity I got nothing about the possibility of this setup, so I came to all you. I want to have linux on board , And to be able to manipulate with sensors and data , placed on the flying drone.

Are there any existing builds, or I should search from the whole beginning and use arduino for flying copter, and put raspberry pi with sensors as excess weight ?

Any help , ideas, links, and other stuff is very appreciated! :hushed:

2

I think maybe you are taking on too much. I would look at the Pixhawk or Pixracer board and use that as the base. You will find that it was originally base on Arduino but has moved on to more powerful processors. It also is base on Nutx which is a real time Linux operating system.

Through the use of these boards they have serial ports that can be used to control the copter. This could be your Raspberry pi or any Ground control system.

Once you’ve gotten this off the ground you can move on to lets say more complicated endeavors.

Mike

3

I have to ask why a single copter? They are not very efficient and constrained by physics in many ways. They will never lift a decent payload at any speed. The weight of the machine by its very design makes its payload small. The only ones that sort of work are petrol powered military ones, but they are so noisy the troops hate them.

4

The “load firmware” section in the link you referenced points you in the right direction. Seems if you can make the changes and compile on the Pi you would be very close. Might be better to start on a quad to make sure your hardware works and you can compile on your system and it works. Once installed then you need to tune.

Have you looked at Erlerobiotics? They have good support. Their stuff runs on pi, Bbb, and odroid. I have their PXFmini for a pi0. I am sorting out gps issues but they are helpful.

5

Nikita,
Yes, it should definitely be possible to get a single or coax copter going with a NAVIO board running Ardupilot. You may need to build your own firmware but the dev wiki has instructions on how to do that. We on the dev team could also get the build servo so that it produces the binaries automatically. There’s someone else who also wants to build one.
I’d actually appreciate some more people flying these slightly unusual frames because they don’t get a lot of testing.

6

I don’t think they ever get far because their horizontal speed is restrained by tipping over and they start getting hard to fly in any wind.