Quadrocopter + Raspberry Pi keeping nice and steady! Great demo from Botched:
I finally managed to get access to a decent camera on a day with good weather! The following video is mostly demonstrating the quadrotors stability under the new four-state Kalman filter I have implemented, that estimates both the current pitch/roll and two gyroscope biases. Most of the flight is hands-off, with the occasional input to correct for wind and inevitable position drift.
I feel this angle control is pretty much perfect, so I will now be moving on to integrating extra sensors to allow for direct velocity and position control. I’m excited to see just how complex I can make the navigation system before the Pi cracks, but it seems for now despite using unoptimized double precision floating point math for everything it still has plenty of headroom to go!
The (rather messy) code is available at https://github.com/big5824/Picopter. Now that the first stage is finished I can start going through cleaning up the spaghetti of test code, but that will have to wait for now.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.
Want a FREE RASPBERRY PI? All orders over $350 get a FREE Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM!