Fixed Wing drone

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi

I'm relatively new to arduino. I have a Mega 2560 and learned using it together with a Spektrum remote, an Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout, an Adafruit 9-DOF IMU BNO55, some servos, escs and motors and finally a not so well working CC3000 Wifi Breakout.

As a first UAV project, I would like to use my old trainer fixed wing. To start, I will build a flight stabilization controller which will not be too hard as there is plenty of literature towards PID mixing. I also want to build fake flaps with ailerons which can be easily made with a separate channel and little programming.

I thought of using an Arduino Pro Mini 5V instead of the big Mega. The sensors would be the GPS and 9-DOF which I described above.

However, I'm not sure about the whole mission planning, data link and so forth. I think the arduino won't be the solution for that as it doesn't have too much processing power. Should I plan to use something like an Raspberry PI as a co-processor for these tasks?

If so, how should I imagine the control&dataflow? I thought of connecting the receiver and 9DOF directly to the arduino as it is essential for a stable flight. The GPS could be connected to the RPI, as well as some communication adapter (wifi, xbee,lora,...). The arduino would send sensor data to the RPI and receive control instructions in return. This way, I think there would be more reliability as I can set the flight mode (manual/automatic) directly to the arduino and take control in an emergency situation.

I have also seen some flight controllers like the pixhawk, but I want to build more by myself and save money :slight_smile:

Could you propose some ideas which I research further to build my UAV? There are projects which only use something like an RPI, a beagleboard or similar SOC. As far as I understand, the main problem is the OS scheduler and possible high delay of operations which come with this.

Thanks for reading and proposing some nice ideas!

Kind regards,
Dominik

3

paradoxxl:
I have also seen some flight controllers like the pixhawk, but I want to build more by myself and save money :slight_smile:

Do you know for sure that you can build the equivalent of a pixhawk for less money ?

4

I didn't mention it should be more of a learning project.

Towards the price: If I had no components at all, I would agree with you. But I have some sensors and buying an additional flight controller with embedded sensors will be more expensive than buying a mini arduino and a SoC.

In addition, the sensors on such a flight controller might not be positioned well regarding em interference from servos, motors and other things.

I will certainly take a closer look at ardupilot sourcecode to get some ideas.