My first idea was to make a simple, small and cheap helicopter flying with self designed hardware. When the hardware arrived and I did some tests with it, I soon came to the problem that small/cheap helicopters can carry very less weight vs flight time. At most I could get 7 minutes of fly time, really boring.
However the first experience with gyro's and accelerator meters were great :), so I didn't do it all for nothing.
Now I've set my mind to quad-copters. They can are easier to build and easier to control. There is also a lot of information and parts that can be used. There are even some well developed quadrocopters in a open source matter that can already follow predefined GPS coordinates.
Anyway, I decided to build my own frame and hardware electronics. The reason that I build my own frame is because I want the frame out of PCB (FR-4) material. In my opinion many quadrocopters on the net are build with heavy weight materials. I think that if I build the frame of PCB, I can save a lot of weight and it will be very easy and cheap to reproduce parts.
The downside is that I do not know how the strength / resonance will be, but I`ll soon find out with my first prototype. I will use 3.2mm thick FR-4 material.
For the electronics I will use an ARM from NXP. They have an great IDE (Eclipse based) and are really affordable tools. And besides that, ARM Cortex series are getting that cheap, that a generic micro-controller (PIC/Atmel) isn't very interesting anymore. Especially if you take a look to the added benefits (better IDE and great speed).
So this it for now. I will (slowly) continue developing in my spare time and hope that I can show something real cool soon! See the hardware PDF's in the repository for more information about the currently IMU that is being developed.
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