Arducopter

ZuCopter – My Arduino UAV

I had this post there since ages, and I thought to just share it as some friends were asking me for one of my (somehow hidden… but not really) passion about this Gadget.
Since several months, I am a proud owner of an arduino based quadricopter. I started following this topic since some years, and got more and more interesting when Chris Anderson (editor in chief of Wired US), founded his social network DIYDRONES http://www.diydrones.com/

I started chasing my wife to be able to spare, month after month, some budget for this project (every family has its own board of director, where the wife controls 9 out of 10 seats J). But at the end, I was able to get it approved and funded!

Here are some picture of the work and some video result so far.
(some more will come later with the nice season)

 

The Arducopter Kit

Assempling the Frame

Assembling and soldering the power distribution

 

Soldered the main flight control board and testing all the sensors (magnetometer, barometer, Compass, 6DOF, GPS, ….) with the telemetry on the pc.
(recognize the bing maps embedded on the mission planner sw, where you can program waypoint for the gps)

 

Assembly and testing with the TX

 

And here is the result:

 

Finally I also added a Gimbal Camera Mount, to stabilize the camera orientation compensating on the quadricopter pan and tilt

 

 

 

Some Recorded Videos