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

Steering and electronics


You may notice from the preceding image that the motor only has two-wires. This is because it's a brushed motor. In the last chapter, we discussed brushed versus brushless motors. A brushed motor requires an entirely different type of ESC. Why is this important? Because (unfortunately) the receiver for our original boat had an integrated ESC. So, we'll need to dig out a new brushed ESC for our motor. While the intern is doing that, let's install our newly printed rudder.

First, we created a block that fits on the back of our duck with the male end of a hinge on it. Then, a simple rudder with a control arm on it (so that as the servo pushes a control rod, the rudder will turn). Mounted, it looks like the following image:

On the inside, we glued our electronics platform into place, drilled a hole (well above the water line) for our control rod. The rod can't be encumbered by silicone, so this hole will leak if water rises to this line. So, we wanted it as high as possible...