RC Gyroscopes

JimB

I am wondering if anyone has tried to interface a gyro like Futuba makes for RC airplanes to the Propeller (or any other of the Parallax PICs)?·

I want to interface an RC gyroscope to a controller so that the controller can provide me an artificial horizon that can be transmitted to my computer and tell me the orientation of an RC aircraft.· Has anyone here tried this?

I think that Futuba’s rate gyros are simple accelerometers, but I may be wrong. If anyone has tried to use an accelerometer or gyro to interface to a propeller, please let me know.

Jim Beauchamp

mosquito56

Does futaba make the specs available for the gyro?? I have 2 helo's with expensive gyros. Would be fun to play with the prop and the gyro.

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cimplex

The Wii is coming out with a gyrscope cube...be interesting to see what's inside of it.... [noparse]:)[/noparse]

W9GFO

I have both Futaba and JR gyros, including an old Futaba mechanical gyro. Some are what they call heading hold gyros in that they will hold the yaw axis of a heli quite firm whereas standard gyros (non heading hold), dampen the tail so that it doesn't move when you don't want it to - it doesn't correct like heading hold will.

All of them will drift. The drift makes them unsuitable for maintaining a position for extended periods. I think you would be better of with an IMU. Ole Man Earl is working with the SparkFun one which costs only $124, less than a high quality RC gyro. http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=804939

Rich H


Edited to correct Earl's user name

Post Edited (W9GFO) : 5/16/2009 5:09:26 PM GMT

Mike Huselton

I happen to have the unit that Old Man Earl is testing sitting on my desk awaiting evaluation.

Earl, can we co-develop routines that uses these devices?
I know from reading the spec sheets that we need I2C and SPI interface routines,
Kalman Filtered IMU via 5DOF Accelerometer/Gyro object routines, etc.

My interest involves wireless Positional Location calculations for tracking personnel
in Hospital Emergency Rooms, but I think that we can develop modules with suitable functional partitioning
for use in our shared endeavors.

Man, we have the greatest hobby in the world!

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JMH

Ole Man Earl

Well, I am quite involved in developing my AutoProp8 autopilot. See my posts and 20 min youtube video. It does all the things you mentioned and more. Be glad to give you some help.

Hanno

I used a very cheap gyroscope (gws pg-03) with great success in my DanceBot. Costs <$30. You send it a 1msec pulse, half a msec later comes a pulse that's longer/shorter than 1msec, depending which direction and how fast you turn it. Very accurate to determine yaw. To determine tilt, you can integrate, but it'll drift over even short periods of time, like 10sec. So, you need to fuse this with an accelerometer using a Kalman filter. Good luck!
Hanno

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