making Gluon board alive

[Dave_fr]

Hi Sid,

Glad you finally have some time with the early board (SN 4 )

1. Yes you need to short both solder jumpers
2. I don't really know about your ICD2 programmer, but mine (a "fake") has only 5 pins. The innermost one is VPP.
3. Yes
4. Yes and yes
5. The 5V one
6. Yes
Tom

I only have the 3.3 volts sparksfun ftdi adapter. Can someone confirm whether you have to have the 5 volts one ?

[Tom]

The board has 3V3 and 4V8 regulators for the sensors, gps and microcontrolle. The 5V is directly fed to the PWM/PPM pins (so be carefull when you want to use a higher voltage).

So you can supply your board with an external 5V, and remove the red wire from your 3V3 FTDI cable.

[Mitch]

For the sparkfun ftdi - just make a 3 wire cable with gnd, tx, and rx. Later on you will see the sparkfun board interferes with the gps connector so this will also avoid future problems.

[Tom]

Mitch, what do you mean by "Later on you will see the sparkfun board interferes with the gps connector"?

[Mitch]

The sparkfun ftdi board is set up to plug directly onto a header without a cable. Very nice except one can't isolate the + wire. Also the sparkfun board will overlap the gluonboard gps header when it is used this way. Not a problem with the gluonpilot board - just the geometry of the sparkfun ftdi. My solution is to simply make up a 3 wire ftdi cable to connect the sparkfun ftdi to the gluonboard header.

[sid]

THanks Tom. I will stick to airplane till you return from vacation. Congrates on the navigation done. WIll download and give it a try..

Regards
SID

[Tom]

For those interested: I added the quadrocopter firmware version. Example config file here.

[sid]

Thanks Tom..

Regards
SID

[sid]

Tom,
Can you also give some more details on the servo out connections to the motors..? Like ch1 should go to motor 1 (which motor to consider as motor 1 ? ) etc.. I am assuming you do not need any mix in the transmitter. A connection diagram to the motors from gluon with the config above would greatly help.

Do we have yaw stability also in Quad or yet to do ?


Regards
SID

[Tom]

Hi Sid,

I added the connection diagram: http://gluonpilot.com/wiki/Quadrocopter

The version in the download section has "yaw rate control". Yaw will slowly drift but you can control it. A previous version had absoluteyaw stabilization but no control.
The next version will have absolute yaw stabilization and control

I haven't found the right PID parameters for flying in winds (but I'm getting there). The ones you find on the forum are for wind-less evening weather.
In the beginning, you should always fly in no wind.
I had large stability bars to prevent broken propellors, if you don't have them you might need to make those P-values 30% smaller