July 2008 Archives

As NG developer I normally don't get round to fly very often (except for silly test-flights where you learn nothing), so my fly hour count is not yet that high. But after a year of testing and flying these things, something finally seems to have registered in my brain and I'm able to fly circles in front of me and around myself.

I would not let you miss the fun, so here it is, my latest flight! Be sure to note the flown circles... :)

Wolferl-NG: Amir flying circles outdoors with his 38cm NG from Amir on Vimeo.

The KML File of the flight following this one is available here.

Update: Three days later I tried it again. This time I decided to fly even more circles. It seems to me that I'm slowly getting the hang on it! It starts to be real fun:

Wolferl-NG: Circles, circles, circles from Amir on Vimeo.

Hello everybody,

I would like to let you have the latest News: The NG is able to use the GPS for tracking!

After having implemented the GPS NMEA parser some while ago I left the GPS beside because to use GPS for controlling you need a working compass. Since the compass of the current hardware revision is not really useable for that sort of thing, I never got round to use the GPS for something sensible.

Last week I suddently realized that even trough it's not possible to use the GPS for controlling purposes without a compass it surly is possible to use it for tracking! So I started hacking on the GPS tracking feature. I store the GPS positions in RAM and for that I reduce the 3 double precision floats to 6 byte. That way it's easy possible to store 1000 points in the free RAM.

I also implemented a small XML generator which directly outputs KML standard files which can be directly loaded in Google Earth. Furthermore I wrote a new behavior action named gps.track() which takes one parameter telling it to switch it on or off.

Writing a behavior rule to switch on GPS tracking when reachin flightstate FLYING and a second rule to stop GPS tracking when leaving flightstate FLYING took another minute and was a two-liner in the NG console.

The first GPS tracking flight was done on the 11.July. You can download the KML file here.
A second GPS tracking flight was done 4 days later:

Wolferl-NG: Amir's maiden flight of his 38cm NG from Amir on Vimeo.

The KML file of a third flight which was done a day later is available here.