Hello everyone. My group is working on a project. We are trying to design a humming bird. In other words, our design will contain:
Now we need to decide on the right microcontroller. We need the smallest and lightest possible. Fairly new to arduino world. Any help will be appreciated!
Thanks.
If going with an Arduino-compatible MCU, you're looking at the ATTiny lineup, probably either an ATTiny85 (5 IO pins) or ATTiny84 (11 IO pins). Both have 8k flash, and 512 bytes of eeprom and ram - the choice is just a matter of the number of IO pins (and the weight associated with said pins).
Ideally, you probably want both a gyro (rotational acceleration) and accelerometer (linear acceleration), too.
Your real problem is going to be the mechanical side, I think.
Actually, it's not the number of pins that matter - it's the package. You want something in the TQFP package, and an ATMega328 is as good as any. You will need to learn to solder such chips as you will be using nearly all surface-mount parts.
If you take note of the design of miniature quadcopters, then you almost certainly want to use a PCB as your actual chassis - what everything else including the motors, mounts on and provides the structural rigidity. And PCB is available in much thinner and lighter versions than that used in your usual Arduino boards.
What about one of these Deltino devices. They contain a 2.4GHz transceiver, Atmega 328 and a h-bridge in a very small package. I use them for radio control on N-Gauge model trains.
...R