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

Testing for water-tightness


As we mentioned earlier, we are going to test for water-tightness at every stage of construction. This is just done by filling a sink with water, and putting the part of the model into the water until the water, is nearly at the lip, for a minute or two. We look carefully for any sign of water coming through the model. You can see this in the following image with the bottom-half of the duck before adding the ballast clay.

It's important to not only let the silicone sealant dry, but let it cure for at least 24 hours before doing this:

After the success of this test, we fill the ballast section with modeling clay, and do it again for two reasons:

  1. We want to make sure we didn't pack it with too firm a hand (breaking a seal)
  2. We need to make sure that the water line comes up to the right level

The bottom-half with the clay pack is shown in the following image:

Awesome! Now that our duck is packed with 2 lbs of clay, we're sure that there's no way it's going to capsize. Also...