Recently we have been working on the STM-32 Nucleo 64 development board. Firstly, we tried to use it as our Flight Controller replacing our older Flight Controller that was purely Arduino based. There were various reasons for our inclination towards STM-32 Nucleo 64 over Arduino UNO. The main reasons included its higher flash memory(64 KB) compared to an Arduino Uno (32KB). Also, STM 32 uses a lot less power than most of the boards with these specifications which is an essential requirement for us. It has more analog channels(10, to be specific) that would be useful in operating sensors that require analog signals. Its good set of peripheral pins is a unique feature which provides an advantage over other microcontroller boards. Higher availability of pins and compatibility with various sensors allowed us to use multiple sensors at a time and procure more data of various kinds. Moreover, STM32 has a larger ecosystem and resources to help. We intended to make use of various libraries and resources available with the STM32 board and speed up our project
Currently, we are trying to get accustomed to working on the STM32 board. Along with it, we tried to use some sensors such as the KMT 32B magnetoresistive sensor. This sensor can be used to measure angles and can act as a feedback system to the motor to control the motor's motion. These measured angles can then be used to control the roll, pitch and yaw movements of the drone as a whole after proper calibration and some calculations. Moreover, it helps in proper positioning of flexible joints and modules like a Camera, GPS etc. All these functions can be executed without using much power, this is a specialty of KMT 32B Magnetoresistive sensor. But still, the main use of it is angle measurement and we are thinking of using it as a magnetometer.
At the same time, we tried connecting the camera with the Arduino, but we were facing some issues in proper connections and storing of the images. We plan to store the images in SD card with the help of the SDMMC controller integrated within STM32. SDMMC allows integration of the microcontroller and SD card. Presently, we will be storing the images captured in the SD card and then load the images and continue with the analysis procedure. Once we are successful in doing so, we will proceed with the real-time analysis of images captured.