Gluonpilot

Got the module a while ago, but I was busy, and then my soldering-iron(?) had somehow died since last time I used it. No biggie. Just that my other two, where deep in a mountain of accumulated junk in the shed. Finally caught a break from work and school, so I spent a few hours in the shed, and found ONE soldering-iron.

This is my first time soldering things like header on a PCB, so I should have done some practice first, but I'm an idiot who happens to be lucky too. The finished result wasn't too bad:



I used some foam to stabilize the header I was soldering. But the real trick I learned was to put some solder on the side of the tip of the iron, and then hold new solder against the base of the pin, while heating the pin from the top with the soldering-iron by using the "wet" tip. "Wetting" the tip helped conduct the heat.



Once I got started, the soldering did not take long. It almost went without casualties too. Got some melted solder on the back of my thumb... where the skin is thin... while I was holding something, and couldn't let go for THREE seconds...

Album for more pictures: http://img96.imageshack.us/g/dscn2041o.jpg/

Hi Daniel,

Glad to see you finally got some time to work on the module!

Are you going to use PPM or PWM's to connect your RC-receiver to the module?

I haven't decided yet. I don't really know much about it. But if I understand it right; PWM is simply connecting all servo-outputs from the receiver, while PPM is connecting the module to the data-stream as it is received by the receiver? PPM seem to be a more elegant solution. Less wire, and more things for the Gluonpilot to do.

I have decided to hold off the plane-buying till later in spring. Right now there is snow all over, and its not the soft, fluffy and dry kind... More like hard(icy) in some places(shadows), wet in others, but generally heavy, cold, and dirty. A low sun, lack of clouds, and a glazed and reflective landscape makes the outdoors a scary place. Not that I was an outdoors-man in the first place.

Would it be possible to set up some zig-bee or gprs communication, and perhaps some simplified autopilot control on an Android or netbook? Maybe even a pilot-camera? Then I could have my own suicide-attack-drone... </fantasy>

Yes, PPM is the preferred solution, because:
- You only need 1 signal wire
- You can verify when the RC-link is out-of-range (and return home for example)
- You can use old RC-receivers, because gluon does all the glitch-filtering onboard!!
BUT: you need to open your receiver, locate the signal and solder a wire to it...

I use Zigbee myself, later on I'll post how to do it. The groundstation still needs to be created, and normally a netbook with windows xp should be fine.

I also couldn't get ppm input to function from the configuration utility with the rtos_pilot code. Again, it works extremely well standalone using the ppm_in_test code.???