For those looking at the pictures and thinking "that's not a Raspberry Pi!", it is... under the black Navio+ board is a new Raspberry Pi model B+[1]
Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
21–30 of 61 posts
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#22[deleted]
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#23Using the RPi as a video encoder may be the "killer app" for this. Currently, there isn't a "ready to fly" solution that will encode video and send it out over LTE.
Exactly! We are working on this and will include a very easy to use LTE streaming configuration for HD FPV experience.
Is it actually possible to fly FPV with that much of a delay?
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#24Is this only 8-bit? That is not really responsive enough. Currently the best-in-class are naze32 with baseflight/cleanflight firmware (stunt, mini copters) or APM / pixhawk (mapping, cinematography, GPS)
It runs on 32bit ARM at up to 1GHz with 512MB of RAM. Completely different league.
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#25Looks very nice. Is Linux actually real-time enough to run autopilot code?
A true real time system is likely over kill.
General time-sharing systems generally are accuracy to +/- 4ms. Which is acceptable for most applications, as 60fps is ~16ms per frame.
If you (ab)use Linux properly you can get most your threads to only halt on blocking for IO. So they'll get scheduled practically (not always) once that IO state is satisfied.
This requires heavy multi-threading not horrible, just isn't amazingly optimized for cache.
I control high pressure fuel systems and we don't need to use Real Time OS's (always), and generally sigh away from them when I don't.
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possibly not. It seems that this runs APM, which is an open source autopilot system. On their install pages, the Raspberry Pi is listed as a companion computer (presumably to be hooked to some other device that runs the code) (which this system might not do) but the Beaglebone Black (which I guess is similar to the Raspberry Pi, so might be what they do here) requires installation of realtime patches for Linux. This…
We run APM on Linux. The port to Raspberry Pi is our effort and it is now supported in APM upstream.
what is the % impact on endurance?
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly! We are working on this and will include a very easy to use LTE streaming configuration for HD FPV experience.
Is it actually possible to fly FPV with that much of a delay?
It's probably possible, but it won't be easy or at all fun compared to a non-packet-switched analog feed.
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#28When I read things like this, it always reminds me of the Kiwi chap that was trying to build a cruise missile in his garage [1]. Although this is smaller than what he had planned, I would imagine you could add a "release" functionality to the Pi Autopilot so it could drop something when at a certain position.
Re: Raspberry Pi inspired autopilot
#29Just curious here. The CC3D boards were also open source, hackable, and only 1/3 the price, and guessing, but looks about 1/5th the size. What makes using better than all those downfalls?
This is completely different. Autopilot runs under Linux and that gives incredible flexibility. You can send HD video over LTE, run scripts in flight. SSH to drone in the air, how cool is that?
How is running scripts (locally?) or SSHing into it over a serial modem any different from the scripting functions or telemetry information available with APM or GCS (CC3D) based systems?
What advantages would the raspi have in streaming HD video over LTE that strapping last years android phone to the drone wouldn't give me?