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UAVP-NG
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Contents |
The Next Generation OS Multicopter Project
The Project
Project details:
- Project Home: http://ng.uavp.ch
- Hardware License: CC-NC
- Software License: GPLv3 (not yet released)
- Contact:
- Project: uavp-ng (at) dev.uavp.ch
- Project Head: Amir Guindehi <amir (at) datacore.ch>
- Head Developers: headdevs (at) dev.uavp.ch
- IRC Channel: #uavp on FreeNode
The History
The abbreviation U.A.V.P. stands for Universal Aerial Video Project.
UAVP is a flying object, ideally suited for making aerial videos and photos (aerial photography), but also suits fun flying a lot, no matter whether indoors or outdoors.
The project uses mainly standard RC model components, so it is basically a model aircraft. The layout of the UAVP project is quite variable, there are virtually no limits in size and lifting weights. Since UAVPs use high quality gyros to allow for stable flight, it is much easier to pilot than model helicopters.
Most of the NG developers came to the Quadcopter hobby by flying a Quadcopter of The Original UAVP Project or of the half-commercial sister project called The MK Project (Mikrokopter@26C3).
This was in summer 2007, the original UAVP was out for half a year and all over the world UAVPs started to get built. The Mikrokopter was quite new then and the community was able to build Mikrokopters (MKs) for 3 months, but the real MK boom had yet to happen...
At that time, many of us started dreaming of bigger and more powerfull processors, peripherials and sensors. The current projects seemed not to be able to scale according to our needs, so the idea of something new was born.
In April 2008, about a year later, there were about 500 UAVPs airborne around the world!
The Idea
Having flown both of these other open projects some of us decided that they do not offer the resources we would like to have on our copters. Especially when looking into the future it seemed that none of them have the scaling possibilities needed. Studying the available processors we realized that we need to switch processor types to get the computing power we dreamed of. Neither PIC nor Atmel could provide what we needed.
In the end we decided to go for an ARM7 and started the Next Generation Quadcopter Project.
Its goal: The development of a free Open Source Quadcopter software and hardware framework for further research based on a high performance 32bit ARM7 RISC CPU.
The Current State
The HW-0.10 is airborne since the january 2008! The system has been flown and the software has been extended with a lot of new features since then.
A new hardware revision 0.20 has been worked on over summer 2008 and the first prototypes were produced some weeks before 25C3. The new hardware was airborne in december 2008. After 25C3 we improved the flight control software a lot and started work on the peripherial controllers of the new hardware.
In summer 2009 we started work on the next hardware revision 0.21. We finished work in june 2009 and produced enough boards for all beta testers and developers. The hardware was airborne in august 2009.
Discovering small problems and print issues we decided to produce a last hardware revision 0.22 fixing those. We hope to produce this revision before 26C3 and have it ready for a first public release at 26C3.
The Community
The initiators of the NG project had a free and open project in mind. The boards will be made available to the public and the software will be released soon afterwards. We have become an international team from all over the world.
We hope to be able to provide a platform for new ideas and new research on the Quadcopter topic. The firmware is built modular and allows different closed-loop control algorithms at the same time to allow different developers to share and compare their algorithms and designs.
We implemented an abstract closed-loop controller framework, which will allow non-programmers like mathematicians, closed-loop engineers and similar minded folks to implement new closed-loop control algorithms without having to understand more than input and output structures of their algorithms!
Everybody - who can agree to the idea of a non-profit, non-commercial Open Source project - is invited to join us and our project on IRC or in the new NG Forum!
The Organisation
Developer Meeting at 26C3
The following developers will show up:
| Name | Status | Presence | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amir | Head Developer | 26.12 - 30.12 | will bring HW-0.21 copter, HW-0.22 boards and tools |
| Axel | Head Developer | 26.12 - 30.12 | will bring HW-0.20 copter |
| ligi | Developer | 26.12 - 30.12 | |
| MarkusBec | Head Developer | 26.12 - 30.12 | will bring HW-0.20 copter, banner |
| Rober-t | Beta-Tester | 29.12 - 30.12 | will bring HW-0.21 copter |
| TobiHH | Developer | 25.12 - 31.12 | |
| Darkriver | Beta-Tester | 25.12 - 31.12 | |
| BenG | Developer | 25.12 - 31.12 | will bring HW-0.21 copter |
| Nebukad | Beta-Tester | 25.12 - 31.12 | |
| Lilalinux | Developer | 25.12 - 31.12 | will bring HW-0.21 copter |
| Spida | Beta-Tester | 26.12 - 30.12 | will bring HW-0.21 copter |
| Wolfgang | Head Developer | 26.12 - 30.12 | will bring UAVP copter |
| MiniMikro | Developer | 28.12 - 29.12 | will bring HW 0.22 and HW 0.21 copter |
Most of the NG developer team will be there!
Hardware Presentation
Since most of us will bring one or more of their Copters with them, we will have quite some hardware to show. Hopefully we will get the new hardware revision into the air before the Congress.
Release
If everything goes well and the new hardware performs as expected we will do the first public release during the CCC Congress.
UPDATE:
The new HW-0.22 PCB are now available to the broad public!
Location and Space
Hopefully the CCC Congress organisation team will be able to allocate us some space somewhere. Our project has been added to the allocation list but the resources are sparse.
Last year we got space on the top floor and were very happy with it. There's more light to work there than in the hackcenter.
We would be very happy if we can get three or four tables with 12 seats. That should be enough space to show the copters & hardware, to have a small solder station and a small workplace to fix and extend the hardware at the congress. We will bring all needed tools with us.
We'll need a LAN connection at the table space.
We will post here, when we know more.
EDIT: We got space and several tables assigned to us on the top-floor called C-Level.
