Far too many drone companies have been involved in a journey that has been characterised by a short honeymoon. From an African standpoint, the journey was always delayed.  Most African drone companies have been involved in training initiatives , environmental initiatives and consumer journalism .  But the bulk of the drone development was performed in Asia , USA and Europe .   So it's no surprise that Venture capitalist invested mainly in Asian and American companies.  But given the recent reports and the foreclosure of big startups last year , the drone landscape has changed.  So a question needs to be asked, what would happen to up-coming drone manufacturing companies based in Africa? Below are three key aspects that we believe drone manufacturers need to take into consideration going to the next 3 to 5 years. Focus on Functionality One of the biggest elements when it comes to drone development is the ability to focus not just on the e...

So the notion that in order for me to proceed scientifically (and practically) towards the design of rotor dynamics identification algorithms that will run in real-time, I first need to model the effects of the rotor failure through experimentation. The two best ways of the doing this are (1) Buy a +R2k Tachometer and record (probably by  recording the display) the speed of the propeller with a pre-determined PWM value. (2) Use the high speed capability of an action cam (such as GoPro) and some clever algorithms to compute the propeller RPM. The latter is the cheaper (and the geekier) option of the two. The setup was such that contrast was created through the use of a black mat cloth on the setup table and painting the opposing blade of the propeller black and white (see below). A RGB (red-green-blue) adaptive algorithm was developed which would mitigate the occurrence of glares on the blade which would in turn give a false reading with the algorithm. Each frame was analyze...

Posted by Chris Anderson on April 25, 2017 at 7:00am  View Blog . The PX4/Dronecode team and Drotek have been working on the next generation of Pixhawk autopilots, and you can now see a preview of that with the Pixhawk 3 Pro . It's based on the new PX4 FMU4 Pro standard, which includes a full suite of next-generation sensors and and the more powerful STM32F469 processor. It's designed for the Dronecode/PX4 flight software, which is the current official Pixhawk standard. The board is currently in developer release, but will be taken out of beta after testing is complete in the next month or two. All details are  here  (and below): ------------------ Introduction FMUv4-PRO takes input from all of the Pixhawk stakeholders; end users, developers, researchers and manufacturing partners. Goals for this iteration of the platform are: – An integrated, single-board flight controller for space constrained applications – A modular multi-board flight controller for ...

Re: fast communication between two arduinos #9 Sep 07, 2015, 05:06 pm Thanks guys, At the end I re-Checked the I2C protocol and understood it can only pass Chars ether by array or singles and managed to work with the code from here: http://ift.tt/1DAeWM4 and created my version to pass a 4 digit code and it work quite fast (less than 1ms). // Wire Master Reader int x,y; #include <Wire.h> void setup() {   Wire.begin();        // join i2c bus (address optional for master)   Serial.begin(115200);  // start serial for output } void loop() {   Wire.requestFrom(2, 6);    // request 6 bytes from slave device #2      int a = Wire.read(); // receive a byte as character      int b = Wire.read(); // receive a byte as character      int c = Wire.read(); // receive a byte as character      int d = Wire.read(); // receive a byte as character ...

South Korea’s National Standard on Drones The Korean Agency for Technology & Standards (KATS) of the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy said that it announced the world’s first national standard on drones on December 30. The national standard has the title of KSW9000: Classification & Terms of Unmanned Aircraft Systems. It provides the definition of terms regarding 52 types of drones, such as large unmanned aircraft and remotely controlled drones, along with six categories of classification based on operating altitudes, maximum takeoff weights, kinetic energy, etc. According to the standard, drones can be classified into five categories based on their maximum takeoff weights, ranging from 2 kg or less to more than 600 kg. In addition, those with a dead weight of 150 kg or less are dubbed unmanned powered aerial vehicles, those with a dead weight of more than 150 kg and up to 600 kg are called midsize unmanned aircraft and the others are classified as large u...

So the time had come for me to test the gopro on the Heli and answer a couple of questions. One that was answered quite quickly was how stable was the configuration. It turned out to be quite stable after all. Although attaching the camera at the nose of airframe makes contro in windy weather quite intricate. I had a couple of close shaves. The eventual footage didn't produce much desired results although that was expected as not much thinking what into the vibration isolation of the video camera. The maiden flight was to see if everything will work as expected. One could potential use a vibration removal video editor although that it last resort. Accumulated flight time: 94min

It's been a while (over three weeks to be exact) since I've flown the heli. I must say I was quite nervous at first knowing that it's the first few minutes of flying after a long time that are quite critical. I also acquired a headset for my gopro which also worked quite well. But none of that mattered because many headaches have taught me to not have a big head in things that I'm still learning. So only after the third battery did I start with Nose-in maneuvers and a bit of slow circuits. Now that the holidays are upon us (and I still don't have a carry case), I will have to repeat this flight when I come back. I was tempted to take it with so I can get some nice shots of nature and the sea side. But I realised that I can't afford to loose this airframe as when I come back the instrumentation of the IMU will begin. Accumulated flight time: 84 min

The generation of embedded aero tables from an automated process which uses Digital Datcom has now been checked. The phased approach was used. The longitudinal dynamics were checked first through effectively flying the glider ballistic in the pitch only. Once expected results were achieved, an initial sideslip (over 10 deg) was introduced at the start of the simulation causing the excitation of the lateral and directional aerodynamics. The checking of these was more tricky as one needs to have a good understanding of the geometrical effects of fixed-wing airplane on its aerodynamics. Below show some plots of the angle of attack and sideslip in a disturbed ballistic trajectory whereby all channels of the aircraft are excited. Given that now we have 6DOF simulation model with a complete aerodynamic model, flight control design and introduction of actuator dynamics can now proceed.