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Other Hobbies and Interests that our NLG members enjoy => Other Hobbies and Interests => Topic started by: cowboygames on November 11, 2015, 07:34:12 PM

Title: Building and programming a quadcopter
Post by: cowboygames on November 11, 2015, 07:34:12 PM
i All, my buddy's son is building a quadcopter as a school project and needs some help with assembly and programming. Is anyone good with Arduino and can you offer some help and advice if I get him signed up on here? His name is Rhett and he is an 8th grader here in Wheatland. Our town is only 3500 people and 70 miles from anywhere, so not a lot of local resources. I can help a bit, but am definitely not a programming or software expert. Thanks in advance for any and all help. Please contact me through personal message if you have something to offer and in the mean time I will get him started on a membership.

Cowboy
Title: Re: Building and programming a quadcopter
Post by: TexasMark on November 11, 2015, 08:13:08 PM
Back when Brookstone first came out with the AR drone, one of the first "hacks" was to be able to operate it with an off the shelf RC radio. To do this, an Arduino was used as the interface. It was not an overly complex project because it was just a matter of converting the RC receiver servo signals into signals the AR drone understood.

I only mention that because I don't know if this project is going to be built from scratch, or something modified like I mentioned above. Building from scratch can be much more complicated because you have so many different things you need to control with the Arduino.

Anyway, maybe someone else here can help more, but I would suggest doing a search for a forum dedicated to quadcopters that are Arduino driven like this one.

http://aeroquad.com/forum.php (http://aeroquad.com/forum.php)
Title: Re: Building and programming a quadcopter
Post by: cowboygames on November 11, 2015, 08:28:47 PM
They gave him a box of parts with no instructions, lol. I'm going to sit down with him tomorrow after work and get him hooked up here on the site. I can identify a lot of the parts, but as far as hooking everything up and actually programming the arduino board I'm afraid I won't be able to do more than help him decipher information and put this together using that information. Thanks for the tip on that link.

Cowboy
Title: Re: Building and programming a quadcopter
Post by: TexasMark on November 11, 2015, 08:51:47 PM
Physically programming the arduino is fairly straight forward and is done via a serial port.  But writing the code is beyond my expertise. All of the code I wrote for my progressive project and other stuff was done with Basic Micro which is very similar to the Basic Stamp. When I modded my quadracopter, I basically just used the program someone else supplied. The code was quite a bit different from what I was used to, so I never bothered to try and learn it. 

If he more or less has a "kit", then it may be pretty simple. Not really much to the mechanical stuff. Basically four motors that are controlled with the processor board. That board may already have everything on it (i.e. the gyro, etc) or there may be separate boards. I know most of the arduino stuff is "standardized" to where you just stack boards on top of each other and they talk to each other through the common mating connector. If it did not come with the programing software, that is a free download from the arduino site.
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