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

Choosing the kitbash boat


We are mostly looking for something cheap with a water-cooled motor. If we order from Amazon, it's pretty rare that you can take a look inside to see if things are modular (not an integrated electronic speed control (ESC) or servo). We have plenty of ESCs and servos in our workshop so we didn't care much. But if you don't have a ton of spare parts lying around, you may consider making the trip to a local hobby shop to look at the inner workings of a boat before you buy. Here's the boat we picked up (as shown in the following image):

It moves at up to 15 mph (far faster than our duck will swim), but this means that it'll have plenty of power to move our (much heavier) duck at a speed of around 3-4 mph. It may even reach 10 mph. We'll never drive it at that speed, but we like to follow Clarence's rule—it's better to have something and not need it, than to need it and not have it. This rule got its name from the movie True Romance. In it, the character "Clarence" says...