This is video of our first autonomous flight!
It when well until we brought the plane in for its first battery change. The plane was a little nose heavy from the sensors and had a hard landing. You can see the badness that this caused in the last post. We are working on repairing it though and expect the next flight to be Monday the 26th.
Hey Everyone
We have successfully implemented code that controls servos, and more importantly it does so based on our IMU. Here is a short video demoing our code.
We implemented a simple complementary filter to ensure that we are getting good data. Our filter also works entirely with integers! This means we avoid any problems we were having with real numbers.
More to come…
More on the ardupiolt Mega and the Transterpreter. When we started the Transterpreter did not support Arduino Mega boards… this was a problem as we are using the Mega to fly our plane. Currently Matt, Drew, and Radu are working on getting us Mega support and are doing an awesome job. We should have it soon. Due to not having the Mega support right away we have been using a Freeduino to do all of our testing on so far.
It has worked great so far, but for the GPS we need 2 serial ports to see whats going on and we only have one. We did however emulate a running GPS and from that wrote a simple GPS string parser. Once we get the mega we may refine our parser, but as of now it works pretty good!
One more hurdle we have tripped over is that floating point numbers are not fully supported in the Transterpreter. We can use them but we can not print them to our screen and see whats going on so. We hope to have floating point printing soon. It has not hampered us to much though.
More to come a post on how we interpreted the output of our sensors.
Yesterday we received a package from Hobby King. 
This is our new battery charger. It charges and discharges up to 6-cell Li-Po battery packs as well as NiMH and NiCD battery packs. It also has a built in Li-Po cell balancer.
These are our batteries so we can use our charger… and power the plane! They are 4 cell 3000mAh Li-Po batteries and they have a 20c discharge rate. This means we can continuously pull 60 amps from each battery. We will only use one at a time though.
This is the speed controller we got for the motor. Its a 60 amp controller with cell protection which protects the battery from being over discharged.
This is our motor. It will spin a 12 in. propeller at about 8000rpm!
More updates to come on the sensors that we have been using and some of the programing we have been up to.