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

Outlining the scope before you design


Before we actually start putting pencil to paper (or rather mouse to CAD, in this case), we need to outline some basic needs and layout of the duck. Let's start with the problems and solutions analysis that we did on the design.

The following table lists the problems and solutions we worked up; although the original table was handwritten, this one is far more legible:

Problems we'll encounter

Solutions

Water leaking into seams of the model

CA glue seams, and fill with silicone sealant.

Water leaking into the location where the propeller shaft meets up with the body

Stationary sleeve for shaft filled with grease and sealed (on the outside) with silicone.

Water leak on access lid

Silicone sealant o-ring.

In event of water leak, waterproofing Pixhawk

Silicone moulded Pixhawk case? (No).

Pixhawk heat from silicone moulded case?

Can't seal it. Must make body as water-tight as possible. Test water-tightness in every stage leading up to Pixhawk integration.

GPS reception...