Re: [Paparazzi-devel] What to do with my money? (Seriously :D)

[Stephen Dwyer]

Hello,

I don't think it is easy to give quick and accurate advice on such a
problem. You undoubtedly have a rather specific application with a set
of specifications, and anyone else can not know how much experience
you and/or your team may have with software and hardware development.
You will probably need to do some serious research to figure out
exactly how to solve this problem. In addition, it is difficult to
know how to advise you without budget and timeline information, let
alone other specifications, such as video quality, framerate, etc etc
etc. This is probably why you have seen limited response from the
list. Sorry to sound so cynical :).

IMHO, it would be better to pursue a Lisa/M instead of Lisa/L if only
for the single reason of availability from Transition Robotics
(http://thequadshot.com/collections/autopilots). Again, it is
difficult without knowing more about your specific requirements and
whether, for example, you have the technical experience to manufacture
your own Lisa/L. As far as traditional heli control goes, I don't
believe there is much currently, though perhaps some of the developers
can better answer this question, and whether it will be difficult to
get it to work if nothing is in place.

Interaction between a higher level processing system (say a gumstix,
beagleboard, pandaboard or other single board computer) that is
handling the imagery (from say a Gumstix Caspa, USB webcam, machine
vision camera like a Point Grey Chameleon or Flea, DSLR or point and
shoot via libgphoto2 or similar) and the autopilot could be done in a
number of ways, including the existing datalink (UART), other low
level interfaces such as SPI, I2C, CAN etc, or possibly USB-serial, or
maybe done on the ground side if the response to the decisions does
not need to be particularly tight or speedy closed-loop control. In
terms of wireless streaming video, that really depends on the range
you need, whether you are fine with analog or digital, framerate,
quality, etc.

For other autopilot hardware, probably best to search around yourself
or checkout the wiki page: http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Get_Hardware

For the radio, if you care about money, you could use a ppm encoder of
some sort: http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/PPM_Encoder. If you don't
care about the money and have a lisa, you could go buy a spektrum
system and use one or two satellites:
http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Lisa/M#Examples_of_Airborne_Equipment_Electrical_Connections
(not yet updated on the Lisa/M_v20 page, hopefully soon)

Hopefully that helps a bit...

Thanks,
-Stephen Dwyer



On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 1:45 PM, Luiz Flavio Felizardo
<address@hidden> wrote:
>    Sorry to bother you guys again, but I have limited time to spend this
> money cause its our university resource for this research and really need
> your help on this.
>    Given the problem: make an autonomous small helicopter (similar to those
> T-Rex models) with 2 cameras imbued (1 for video streaming and 1 for taking
> pictures and analysing them making decisions depending on what is seen).
>    I need a list of hardware that I should buy. Including the Radio,
> autopilot, gps and others. I have some experience with Lisa/L.
>
> Thanks very much!
>
> Felizardo.
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Luiz Flavio Felizardo
> <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> Hi there, I intend on buying some autopilot board and before I do I
>> would like you guys to recommend me some board, I already have and use
>> a Lisa/L for a while, so my first thought was to buy another one, but
>> looks like no one is assembling it anymore.
>> I would like to know why the Lisa/M is better than Lisa/L(other than
>> size) and which board do you recommend me to buy (please post where
>> can I buy it too).
>>
>> The main goal I'm trying to reach is to make an autonomous small
>> helicopter (similar to those T-Rex models) with 2 cameras imbued (1
>> for video streaming and 1 for taking pictures and analysing them
>> making decisions depending on what is seen).
>>
>> Besides the autopilot I wish to know everything else I´m going to need
>> to accomplish the described above I have some good money to invest now
>> and I really need your help on that.
>>
>> Other than that I wish to use a radio I already have here, its a
>> Fly-Sky radio (one of those cheap chinese radios) and we are having
>> too much trouble on getting the PPM signal from it, anything you could
>> recommend to get the signal from it would be helpful too.
>>
>> Thanks very much.
>> Luiz Flávio Felizardo.
>
>
>
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