Learning to fly with Airbit2 and microbit
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- Опубликовано: 2 ноя 2024
- Now microbit is going to help me to learn to fly.
Microbit controls a Airbit2 Drone from Makekit. It comes as a kit and it is suitable as a STEM Club project. The only issues that some safety and precautions are needed with starting the drone. In the video I show Airbit2 with both propeller guards on and off but it is better to have the guards on even if it hurts your finger installing them.
Makecode is used for software and the controller board on Airbit2 connected to microbit. The controller board has a 6 axis IMU (acceleration & gyro) and there is a 800mHr LiPo battery to power it.
A second microbit is needed as a remote controller and both microbits use a similar image on their LED arrays to show pitch(P), arm(A), roll(R) and throttle(T). If you add yaw(Y) controls you can have a real PARTY.
For the remote control I used a Elecfreaks Joystick:bit.
I used microbit V2 for both the drone microbit and the remote.
It took me about 2 hours to assemble the kit, test the software and download code into both the remote and drone microbits - I made a few mistakes and I added the wifi camera before testing everything. Unfortunately I plugged the camera into the microbit and thought I might have done some damage. Once you assemble everything the port labels are hidden and I recommend adding your own labels to the belly of the Airbit frame.
Despite this and getting help from the local distributor, Education Technology Specialist I was ready to fly. Learning to fly it was difficult and I progressed from using it inside the home to the garden. Even this was not enough and Airbit2 needs space while you are learning - so next time it will be the local park when it cools down outside. It is also hard to control and camera at the same time control Aibir2!
While there is good help in the Makekit website, the main problems are a lack of documentation for the more advanced aspects. There is no help for the Airbit2 Makecode extensions and you have to guess what each extension block does - while this is not hard it should have been included.
An alternative to Airbit2 is the Elecfreaks Drone:Bit which also uses microbit. It is currently out of stock and much cheaper than Airbit2. There is much more help on the Elecfreak website including four projects while Airbit2 only has the code for one main project. The Elecfreak microbit drone also uses a different sensor - Time of Flight and barometer so the control strategies are different.
References:
Airbit2:
www.makekit.no...
www.makekit.no...
Elecfreaks:
www.elecfreaks...