Help finish Tricopter Project $$

teganburns

I have lost the battle but not the war...

As some of you know I have been working on a project to make an autonomous tricopter for some months over a year. The project has overwhelmed me and is above my math and programming skills. So I'm looking for some one on one help.
I know a lot of you are prophead geniuses and this wouldn't take too much time to finish up. I have attached my code. (given i stopped mid thought, also have to give credit to Jason I used a lot of snippets from his quad code)
If any propheads think you can handle this please PM me.

teganburns

[Tricopter.spin added because of the limit of ten attachable items.]

SRLM

Are you trying to make it truly autonomous, or remote controlled? If you're going for the former then it's going to be very difficult, and you have a long way to go. Below is my (and partner's) best effort at making a quadrotor autonomous with a Propeller as the controller. It's the product of 6 months of work, and it still needs more to finish.

https://code.google.com/p/anzhelka/source/browse/#git%2Fsoftware%2Fspin%2Fsrc

And here's the 19 page math document that outlines how inputs (desired orientation, current orientation, desired altitude, current altitude) are transformed into outputs (motors 1-4 PWM). For a trirotor the math is the same up to the point where it calculates the output based on the vehicle model. For that, you'll have to adjust for the different dynamics of a trirotor.

https://anzhelka.googlecode.com/git/doc/reports/quadrotor_mathematics.pdf

In any case, maybe this provides some inspiration.

teganburns

Thanks! Do you by chance happen to have the "anzhelka terminal program" I couldn't open the one from github. (or rather what program does it open with? :P ) My computer recognizes it as a python file???

SRLM

That program is a GUI, written in Python, to make it easier to work with programming a quad. Basically we used it to display a bunch of real time data transmitted over the USB RX/TX lines using a pair of Wixels. The GUI is a Python program, and IIRC it has some dependencies on WxPython that you may have to install first.

You can see it in action with our single motor test stand here:

Kyle M.

As I'm a mechanical and systems engineering, I unfortunately won't be much help here. I will mention, however, that the "how to build a quadcopter book" parallax retails does go though the programming involved in using the Propeller Activity Board as a flight controller (for a quadcopter...).

As this is multirotor-related discussion, I will be requesting that it be moved to the multitrotor sub-forum. Please use the sub-forum for all future multirotor-related (this includes drones, unmanned aircraft) discussion. Thanks for your understanding as we work to make this forum more user friendly.
Cheers,
-Kyle