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Arduino basics applicable to quadrotors

Former Member

Hey everyone,

I'm an engineering student and as part of my course next year I am going to be working on a project to create an arduino controlled quadrotor from scratch.  I have no experience with arduinos and little experience programming but I have managed to get hold of an arduino uno and some basic parts to mess around with over the summer before term starts again. The actual project will be using an arduino mega and accelerometers and gyros but i want to start with something a bit simpler and cheaper before I start messing around with more expensive components.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about some simple projects to get me used to the arduino environment that would also be applicable to my project.

 

I've already thought of mocking up one arm of the quadrotor and getting it to balance with tilt sensors and a motor connected to a propeller.

 

Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers

TSJ

  • 0

    Hi Tomos,

     

    If you have not used Arduino before, you might want to start with a simple tutorial.

    This previous post lists a few you can try:

    http://www.element14.com/community/message/75588#75588/l/easy-beginner-tutorial-for-arduino

     

    I know that some of it is pretty basic, but the skills used for the basics (like blinking an LED) transfer to pretty much everything else.

    The oomlout tutorial includes a tutorial for controlling motors and their speed, so that might be useful.

     

    You can then use those building blocks to take the next steps.

     

    To start with a tilt sensor you might just want to have it light up LEDs (maybe vary the brightness) to start with.

     

    And I like your idea of balancing a single arm - I guess you'd have the pivot located such that the motor end of the arm can swivel below and above so that the motor speed would have to be adjusted to keep the arm level.

     

    Good luck on your project! I hope you post or blog about it on e14 image

     

    Cheers,

    -Nico

  • 0 in reply to ntewinkel

    Unless you're using this as a learning exercise, your end game is fairly well covered by KK2 and MultiWii controller boards.

     

    Both have the ability to control multi-rotor coptors of varying configurations, and are very cheap.

    check out http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__657__501__Multi_Rotors_Parts-Flight_Controller.html

     

    You could explore the controlling of other things using Nintendo Wii, which is a cheap way to get some powerful accel/gyro with I2C connection, making it very easy to interface to the Arduino.

     

    Mark

  • 0

    Hey Guys,

    Thanks for the response.

    Nico:

    The idea of using the LED first sounds a lot simpler than jumping straight in with the motor.

    Yeah that was the plan with the balance, it could also be expanded into a 2 or 4 motor configuration as the project develops and yes I do plan to blog about it on here when it gets started image

    Mark:

    This is mainly going to be a learning exercise but I also want to have my own quadrotor design completely programmed from scratch eventually so I'm not reliant on 3rd party stuff ( awkward I know but that's me ).

    The idea for cannibalising a Wii-mote sounds great I'd not thought of that as a source of parts.

     

    Cheers

    TSJ