Meeting times will be on Wednesdays from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm and on Saturdays from 11 am to 1 pm. Both meetings will be held in the physics garage room.

Most Recent Announcement

Hello all,

Matt and I worked on Saturday and finally got the Raspberry Pi and Arduino to work on the PCs in the garage. Since we now have the basic stuff running we can start splitting into groups to finish certain tasks to finish stage 1. Stage 1 will just be making the quadcopter fly at a certain altitude and stay there for a while without moving out of position to much. The task that everyone should do (or at least agree on) are: 1- Designing a programming interface. 2- Downloading mercurial or a software sharing/version checker so we can share our code and do team work effectively. 3- Updating the wiki when doing something and making a document on what you did and why (very important so someone can take over if you are busy and have other things to do).

Now here are the tasks for Stage 1 that you can choose from and do in smaller groups or by yourself: 1-Learning how to read the gyroscope, accelerometer and controlling the motor speed and maintain stability through programming the Arduino . Probably will be very time consuming task. 2-Programming the communication between the Raspberry pi and Arduino. 3-Designing and creating a power supply circuit with a battery monitor for both the pi and the Arduino. 4-Creating the plastic surface that the circuit will be on using the 3D printer. 5- Setting up Raspberry pi for ssh and other raspberry pi stuff.

Mat should upload the picture of the diagram that shows all of the functionalities of the Arduino and pi that shows how the tasks are divided (Also email him if you want the username/password for the pi!). We should be able to finish stage 1 quickly (no approximate date scheduled yet) and make this thing FLY!

Tell me anything I missed, something you want to add, or what you want to do and update the wiki page. I also updated the wiki to show this information.

Have a good week, Ahmed Saif

Since we now have the basic stuff running we can start splitting into groups to finish certain tasks to finish stage 1. Stage 1 will just be making the quadcopter fly at a certain altitude and stay there for a while without moving out of position to much. The task that everyone should do (or at least agree on) are:

Now here are the tasks for Stage 1 that you can choose from and do in smaller groups or by yourself:

-Ahmed Saif

Quadcopter

People Involved

Ahmed, will your homegrown copter fly this Saturday?

Resource information at Drones project! - duncan

No, This Saturday (9/14) we will build the frame of the quadcopter then for each subsequent week adding components until we get a full grown quadcopter with whatever add-on we can. -Ahmed

Saturday 10/5/2013:

We will be using SPI to handle the communication between the pi and the arduino. The pi will be the master and the arduino the slave.

NOTE that the raspberry pi is a 3.3V device and the Arduino is 5V a level converter will be needed for safe communication between the devices.

Today I have verified that two arduinos can communicate over spi in a master slave pair according to this tutorial.

I am also attempting to verify that the rpi can communicate with itself with the MISO and MOSI pins shorted. I am following this tutorial.

Wednesday 10/2/2013:

To start the arduino IDE on the centos machine open a terminal and type: "arduino &"

I was unable to get the arduino IDE to be able to connect the serial port on the centos machine. I tried adding the user to the lock group and restarting, which removed the error messages, but the serial port in the toolbar is still grayed out.

I installed the pyserial module on the Pi and was able to perform basic serial communication between the pi and arduino after using a different computer to upload the arduino sketch.

I will be working on the communication protocol between the arduino and the Pi.

-Matt

Managed to hook up the gyroscope, accelerometer and compass chip to the arduino and take some measurements. The current speed of obtaining speed from all 3 devices is 250 hz.

But the gyroscope, accelerometer and compass chip can be overclocked to get 4 times the speed and that is what I will try to do next time.

-Ahmed

Saturday 9/28/2013:

Installed the OS for the Raspberry Pi:

hostname: soos

ask me for the login credentials if interested (mebert at wisc dot edu)

I was unable to ping the pi through direct connection to the device. Once we get a switch down here it should be easier to set up for ssh.

Edit: The ip address for the pi is 128.104.160.93 but this is not static and may change.

-Matt

I finished setting up the computer in the back for the Arduino. Need golden banana male/female connectors for the motors.

-Ahmed

Sunday 9/14/2013:

We built the frame of the quadcopter. Here are some of the images we have taken during the assembly: