Firstly the STM32F4-Discovery. I wasn't originally going to buy this but as the Olimex products I was going to use are going to take a month and a half to ship, I decided I would buy the Discovery dev board. The Olimex board is still on order though as its simpler and JTAG based I thought would be good for simple projects. I haven't done much with the Discovery board yet other than power it on and watch the LEDs flash in patterns. As I said in my last post, I'm writing a tutorial on how to set up a development environment using Eclipse and OSX, so I probably won't be doing a whole lot until I have figured that all out. But that unfortunately all comes after work and uni so I haven't had much time to play with it since I got it on Thursday plus I've been playing with the Pi (covered in another post).
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| The STM32F4-Discovery Board |
So just some quick ideas for the multicopter project and a small object to print on the 3D printer.
Firstly sensors for the copter. I saw somewhere during the week that one of the copter projects or someone who had a copter had a pressure sensor on board. I thought this would be quite cool and could potentially be used to measure height or weather.
Next I was looking at GPS modules/chips and found one that had a pin for an aerial which I thought would be quite cool as could put an external aerial on top of the copter so it would get much better signal and less interference.
I had a crazy idea during the week when I saw a picture of a bunch of people flying copters with video glasses. The crazy idea was to put cameras on the inside of these that then fed into eye tracking software and then could focus the cameras on board the copter to match where the user was looking. I think its doable but would take far too much effort, maybe for a final year university project!
Another thing I bought during the week were some spare LEDs and had another idea that I could put side lights on the copter so it was easier to see where it was at night. It may also be required if I was to fly it at night, I'm unsure as I haven't read the legislation.
Finally for the copter ideas, I was reading a book on using ARM microcontrollers and it reminded me that the chips have privileged and unprivileged execution modes. My idea was thus that the main stabilising and control system should be privileged and the plug-ins such as artificial intelligence should be unprivileged so the copter doesn't fly into anything. This would also allow manual control to override artificial intelligence at any stage, such as if it was about to fly into an object.
The very last item for this post is an object that I should print on a 3D printer. Firstly a rant at Apple. I have an Apple Wired Keyboard and apple in their wisdom decided to take off from the design the legs from the back so it doesn't sit up very high. My problem with this, is as my desk is quite shallow, I need to push my keyboard back but to do this need to put it up higher to get over other objects, namely the base of my monitor. Anyway to get over this, when I buy my printer, I'll create some decent legs that hold the keyboard up so it doesn't wobble and wall back down again.
That's all for this post. I was thinking of maybe posting the first part of the tutorial up tonight as well but I've now decided that I should hopefully have it done during the week or next weekend so I'll wait until then. Signing off...
