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

Hooking up your Pixhawk


Now that we have somewhere to put our Pixhawk, we can go over how to attach it and program it for a basic rover. The Pixhawk comes with several strips of ¼"—thick foam tape. This stuff is great. It absorbs vibrations and shocks to the Pixhawk that could potentially throw off sensor readings. Before using it though, make sure you clean off your part. Mould-release spray is very oily stuff, and is meant to keep things from sticking together. Simple liquid dishwashing soap does the trick perfectly. I like Dawn, as it cuts grease especially well and is easy to rinse off.

We can just hot glue our mount into the frame of the rover, and then foam tape the Pixhawk in. Notice that the USB port is still above the side guard to allow access for programming, as shown in the following image:

Our Pixhawk is level, secure, protected, and pink. The first component we're going to hook up will be the GPS.

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Although we can hook up two GPS antennas for more...