Drones and ROVs and Arduinos
A journey building drones and ROVs and other open hardware and Arduino based stuff
Arducopter ready to fly (with bonus indoor flight crashing)
Over the last 2 weeks I completed the assembly of the Arducopter, which is now just waiting to be taken out and tested with a bit of space around. This … Continue reading
OpenROV: a underwater remote controlled vehicle
Today on DiyDrones I found an article about OpenROV, a underwater remote controller vehicle that asked funding on KickStarter, and reached their 20k target in just one day. I’ve had been following their progress … Continue reading
Remember you need to reverse the pitch channel in Arducopter
This is what you get by flying indoor without doing a proper check of all systems before taking off. While I was doing the test to see if yaw, roll … Continue reading
Testing Arducopter using a bench power supply
While testing the Arducopter I’ve seen that soon after the first basic tests with the Mission Planner and the USB, testing with a real power supply was needed. But I … Continue reading
A better OpenROV cape wiring
The OpenROV cape comes without any connector and last week when I tested the cape I just soldered wires directly to the cape. But it was not very neat, as … Continue reading
Starting to work on Arducopter
Now that the OpenROV Cockpit 1.0 beta has been released, and since I don’t envision diving in a lake before the temperature goes back above zero degrees Celsius, I decided to … Continue reading
Testing the OpenROV cape
Last week I received a prototype version of the OpenROV Cape (previously known as ArduSwimmer) and over the last few days I tried assembling as much as possible to finally … Continue reading
How to control a brushless motor through a ESC with Arduino
Electronic speed control (most commonly known as ESC) are nasty beasts: not from the controlling software point of view but for the way they need to be powered up, and … Continue reading
Makers Italy: the Italian Makers Faire
On my way back from the Node.js Conference, I stopped by at Makers Italy, the first Italian Makers Faire in the new expo area of Milano. There were a lot … Continue reading
How the OpenROV software works: my presentation at the Node.js Conference Italy
Today I had the honor and pleasure to present OpenROV at the Node.js Conference Italy: I presented how the OpenROV software works, especially focusing on the the Node.js part of … Continue reading
Cutting parts for the new EChassis
Today I spent some time at the FabLab.iMAL cutting the new electronic chassis Eric designed for the kickstarter kits. Finding the right cutting parameters But before doing the real cuts, … Continue reading
Cutting all OpenROV parts at FabLab.iMal
Last month I had the honor to be among a small group of people that publicly inaugurated the FabLab of the iMal with the summer workshop on digital fabrication. During that week we learned how … Continue reading
Motors, ESCs and impellers: some problems attaching the impeller to the shaft
After a very troubled shipping (HobbyKing is great and cheap, but the pain of all these import duties and payments sometimes makes me want to find a EU based reseller) I … Continue reading
Acrylics arrived and rubber parts sourced
Taking advantage of a day off-work, today I went shopping around for the tubes for the batteries and for O-Rings and the end caps for the tubes. Best place for … Continue reading
OpenROV gets funded
Today OpenROV got funded on Kickstarter. As you can see from the screenshot above, it received 111622 USD of pledges (more than 5 times the funding needed to start the … Continue reading
Saturday shopping: electronics and some more parts
This Saturday morning I went shopping around for some of the missing parts: first a visit to the local electronic shop for the components needed for the Arduswimmer cape and … Continue reading
BeagleBone arrived
The BeagleBone and the Adafruit Proto Cape Kit for Beagle Bone I ordered are finally arrived. Now I just need to wait for the components to start trying and build the … Continue reading
Making sense out of the ArduSwimmer cape
The architecture of the control unit of OpenROV is pretty simple: The BeagleBone card hosts a webserver running a Node.js application The browser interacts with node.js app to watch the … Continue reading
The OpenROV body: adapting to EU sizes
As everything that gets built and designed in the US, especially DIY things, there is always the problem of the conversion between the imperial system (inches and feets) to the SI (International … Continue reading
A new telemetry
Last year I bought the 2.4Ghz XBee telemety kit, and even if I haven’t used it yet, 3D Robotics came out with a new telemetry kit, based on more low-level … Continue reading
