Monday, March 18, 2013

Aeroquad Multicopter

One of my latest areas of interest are multi-rotor flying vehicles. I've been interested in them for awhile, but never enough to get serious. Then last year I saw a video of a quadcopter on some website showing someone FPV (First Person View) flying around in Paris. It renewed my interested once again. This time, however, I was determined to get into the hobby.

My philosophy on hardware and software is to look for something that isn't closed. This means that I don't want to spend my money or time on a platform that is controlled by a single entity with no way to improve the platform should that single entity decides to quit. I used my best Google Foo and stumbled upon AeroQuad (http://aeroquad.com). This is a project that was started by an individual but has quite a following of folks working on various parts of the platform as part of their hobby. The software and hardware are both opensource!

I decided to go with the Typhoon ARF (almost ready to fly) kit because I'm new to this hobby and I didn't feel like sourcing everything myself. The ARF kit includes everything you need except for transmitter and batteries, so it doesn't take long to get ready to fly.

Here are a couple of pictures of the build in progress:




Although this hobby can be a bit pricey, it was a fun and easy build. Stay tuned for flying pictures!

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