Nerds assemble! Raspberry pi close to launch date.

[RomanNose]

Thanks very much for that, was just wading through the CAA website! Was looking at some kind of auto flight stabiliser I found the other day just to lessen the strain of keeping one level, may start serious thinking now!

I don't think anyone flies without gyros lol. My one is gyro + accelerometer, not enabled the accelerometer yet as P.I.D are not quite right. My plan is just to hook up 2-4 webcams, then run a script that takes pictures every few minutes. Should be quite easy to do.

I thought you were using an arduino for this?

Yep I am, hopefully someone comes along and makes a flight controller for it. The problem is that it might need to be redeveloped or perhaps they will port multiwii, who knows. So until that happens it will be a simple webcam script that takes pictures.

 

[RomanNose]

I was thinking about having a wifi device to stream video directly. Think thats how I may have been breaking the regs, due to it being out of 'line of sight' or something. Still, I'll have to draw up some plans and pick you brains at some point if you wouldnt mind

Wifi is on 2.4Ghz, the video transmitter does not use wifi but uses something similar just different modulation. The main idea is that you have a high gain antenna, to increase the range. This is a nice website that has some good informationhttp://www.fpvuk.org/things-explained/vtx-power-and-range/. So you could use 2.4ghz video and 35Mhz transmitter. I have never done fpv before but have somewhat of an idea how it works, check out rc groups fpv section. I always say that you should walk before you run, start off with a quadcopter, trim it all out and get used to flying it. Remember that you are only going to get around 10 minutes flight, not much of a problem when batteries cost pennies though. So get a quad, sort that all out and then get into fpv. You want to have a good idea how much power the quad normally has as you will be lifting extra weight with fpv.

 

[RomanNose]

It is possible and people are doing it. Ardupilot has waypoint functionality. The problem is that no one is sure what CAA think about the spotter rule as iirc it has never been enforced.

 

[RomanNose]

I still think it's a pointless gimmick. Sorry.

Why?

 

[RomanNose]

Is Solar Power not an option to extend flight time? Not sure if you could generate much juice, even on a really bright day, but has anyone tried it?

Doubt it would be of any use on quads as they have practically zero surface area compared to large gliders. People have done it on planes, not sure how it has worked out.

 

[RomanNose]

Just got a pre order slot .

 

[RomanNose]

What T shirt is it? As I will be wearing my one with pride if it has the raspberry pi logo on it.

Just place the words RPi with the following choice of sizes XS/S/M/L/XL/XXL)

I forgot! Can you change it?

 

[RomanNose]

Looks like this

Looks stupid, I just want a raspberry pi t shirt!

 

[RomanNose]

It looks OK I guess, I wonder how long it will take for someone to recognize it .

 

[RomanNose]

I just got put forward to May!

 

[RomanNose]

It will be about GPIO, arduino is another of unnecessary complexity. May be helpful for some more advanced things but I am putting my money on a nice shiny software package coming out to take advantage of it.
Only problem is that it's not a real time OS, we will just have to wait and see what the limitations are. Is that a big problem? Probably not as we could interface with arduino.

 

[RomanNose]

Reaal time OS's are used for micro second precision. With desktop opreating systems, you have a scheduler that says when to perform a task. Linux has loads of background processes, taking up cpu cycles. The problems can start in sensing systems, if you had a quadcopter and the program lagged due to another process, it will come crashing down. For some situations, we will have to interface with arduino. We have robot cars using the pi, but for some things we will communicate over serial to an ar duino.

 

[RomanNose]

Apparently there are some real time kernels, we might be OK actually. If they run fine then I imagine, we won't have many problems apart from a bit of time jitter.

 

[RomanNose]

Farnell made a mistake, if you got that email about being delivered in May, it's wrong and it will come when it was originally quoted.

 

[RomanNose]

Well it can play pretty much all x264 @1080p smooth, probably all x264 profiles as well. It will probably stutter on wmv, or stupid other non accelerated video formats. Who cares though, 99% of all videos being made now are in x264.

 

[RomanNose]

Well you can't use netflix on linux anyway, it will be fine for 480p for any file format which I think most other streaming services are anyway. Drm services are inherently incompatible with the linux ethos, I don't think many are compatible and if they are they probably just use flash. The pi might get so popular that these streaming services remove DRM, make everything downloadable and have a decent API.

 

[RomanNose]

Doh! I thought you were talking about it's lack of CPU power and that it can't handle all video types in your first post. None of these USB computers are going to be able to use these streaming services without help from the companies themselves. I hate DRM, why can't companies just offer a stream and 1080p x264 download?

 

[RomanNose]

Won't it run linux though, so it's still going to be a nope? The pi will handle any 480p stream, it's just a problem with silverlight that is flipping everywhere.

 

[RomanNose]

The pi could run android though. It will be a port though.

 

[RomanNose]

Well there is a team called android x86 that is porting android to the x86 platform running, they have made significant process. They have the market working, I guess they are working on 3d stuff now.