Wednesday, January 27th, 2010
This is video from last September of my first Ardupilot test. To keep the first test simple, I modified the software configuration to fly a simple fixed heading of 45 degrees when I engage the autopilot from the R/C unit. This worked very well for a while until the last attempt, when something glitched in the software/GPS and commanded a dive into the ground into one of the few trees in the field. The end of the video shows several frames of video as the pieces were stripped off the airplane by the tree. All the electronics survived the crash and I’m rebuilding a new airframe to test in the Spring.
Tags: Ardupilot, autopilot, Easystar, GPS, Hobby
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Sunday, April 6th, 2008
I was working today on my little gadget I designed last year. On its first test run last December, it was dropped on the “on/off” switch and broke. The test trials were very short and the project was shipped back to me for what I thought was an easy fix. Well, the switch is fixed, but now the AVR decided to stop communicating with the JTAG interface so I can’t program the beast anymore. Unfortunately, I didn’t design a ISP interface onto the board so I have to tack wire wrap wires to the 4 lines on the Mega128 and hook up my ISP to try to get the JTAG fuse set to re-enable the interface. Well that doesn’t work either – the debug interface says the chip can’t go into program mode. But I checked some pins on the micro with my scope and it seems to be very happy doing something – sending data on the serial interface and flipping bits on the I2C interface like crazy. However the display doesn’t work and I can’t get a firmware boot to load either.
Well that reminded me of Colossus the Forbin Project – my favorite movie when I was 14 years old and I had to pop the DVD into the PS3. Darn old Collossus decided to do its own thing also. Only – it can launch ICBMS and my little ATMEL Colossus can only annoy me.
Here’s the info on this little known movie:
Colossus: The Forbin Project
Eric Braeden, Gordon Pinsent, Leonid Rostoff, Willard Sage, Martin E. Brooks, Dolph Sweet,
An artificially intelligent supercomputer is developed and activated, only to reveal that it has a sinister agenda of its own.
Tags: Atmel, AVR, I2C, ISP, JTAG, Microcontroller, Movies, SciFi, The Forbin Project
Posted in ATMEL AVR, Electronics, Movies | No Comments »
