Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By : Ty Audronis
Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By: Ty Audronis

Overview of this book

The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Installing the propulsion system


We want to perform the next steps before the clay dries up. First, we want to take out a small chunk of the clay at the back, and drill a hole at an angle. There, we'll feed the sleeve and drive shaft through and install the propeller. Do not ever glue a sleeve into place. It needs to remain flexible. Instead, we use a liberal amount of silicone to hold it in place, and seal the hole inside and out of the body (as shown in the following image):

Now, it's time to make our motor mount. We wanted to see exactly where the drive shaft will be, the angle it's at, and where the hookup to the motor is. We do the same thing we did for the drive-shaft sleeve on the front of the boat. There, we put the long end of the water-cooling tube. We do this before placing the motor mount, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to get at it. This tube will take in water for the water cooling (as shown in the following image). After waiting for the silicone to dry, we can trim it...