Recently had a need for a similar mechanism that needed to be FC agnostic as well. We actually opted for separate control, using on board video for precision drops. I like the Arduino approach. We went with separate on-board control because phase 2 requires lower the item to dropped on a line (reel) and then dropping from the bottom of the line and reeling the line and drop mechanism back in.
Hi Todd, I'm working on video precision detecting that I think that has the same principle of you precision drop. Would love to know more about your project and to obtain some additional information to my project. Do you think it would be possible to exchange some ideas with you ? Thanks!
There is a nice drop mechanism on thigaverse already just do a search. As you already know a pixhawk drone would be the way to go with 16 channels on the x8r it's really simple
Cool will see what I can find. Most of the ones I've built previously or found require an external signal to drop. Yes it's nice and easy with the X8R but unfortunately DroneBlocks is not compatible with Pixhawk aircraft....yet. The problem is we don't have the ability to easily control gimbal pitch, camera exposure, camera shutter with code in the world of APM/Pixhawk. We recently added support for 3DR Solo but unfortunately the market is limited compared to DJI....unfortunately. Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
Dear Dennis, This is very interesting project and i can already see wide range of applications that we could implement using your mechanism. Do you have a tutorial for beginner who wants to setup similar system with drones? I am thinking of buying the Microbit and implementing your steps and would really appreciate if you already have a tutorial for this entire mechanism. Thank you Dennis. I am always fascinated by your projects and try my best to implement those. Best,, Suman
Suman, thanks for the good words. This is still a work in progress. There was a lot of interference with the compass because of motors and vibrations. I'm looking at different ways to approach this. I will share more details in the near future.
Sorry for the delayed reply and hope you're doing well. I love Solo. It's an awesome bird and the fact that it has Pixhawk makes it ever better. I'm hoping to make DroneBlocks compatible with it. We originally began work on it, but after 3DR stopped supporting it means that a lot less of them will be in the marketplace. So we've been focusing on DJI. That being said you can get them for super cheap now. Just wish I could use something other than a GoPro camera on it. I don't think you can go wrong for the money and I know there is an initiative to bring it back to life from some of the Pixhawk devs. Good luck and keep us posted on what you do.
Thanks Dennis! I bought one new for 200.00 and could not believe it! Are you still working with it? I haven't flown mine yet due to weather..Do you have a website so I can keep up with what you are doing? Kevin
@Dennis Baldwin you could use a UART port on the flight controller triggering a solenoid replacing the servo, in my humble opinion it is a simpler solution - isnt it?
The only challenge is I wanted to get this working with P3/P4 and other DJI aircraft. In those scenarios there is no serial comm. The M100 does support it, but that's a much more expensive option that not many users will have access to. Keep the good thoughts coming.
This is awesome Denis. I love your channel and the work you do!! But if I can be so bold as to ask....why have you stepped away from ardupilot? It seems from the outside that you have decided to step away from that and have been just concentrating on DJI and their "version" of what open source is ....which like you indicated that with the SDK they only allow limited third party contribution. Not trying to give you a hard time Dennis and you don't owe me any explanation but I was just wondering.
Thank you for the comment and great question. I feel like I need to do an entire video explaining this....actually I may do so in the near future. There are many reasons I don't focus on Ardupilot as much, but the main one is that my focus is on education through software. I want to help bring young students into the world of programming drones. I started this with DroneBlocks and we will be extending the program to higher education. Originally DroneBlocks was written for DJI and then we added Solo support. The reason being is that we have programming blocks such as "pitch gimbal", "take photo", "record video" that can't easily be done with standard Ardupilot builds. Solo provided us a standard interface and it was very capable. Now that 3DR Solo is no longer supported we had to shift focus on DJI. I've been talking to a couple of the Solo devs and we may be bringing the project back to life. I hate being tied to DJI when all my focus has been on Ardupilot over the years. Think about an APM/Pixhawk build that has a standard gimbal which you can control via code, or take a photo via code. There is not standardization in the APM/Pixhawk world and that's what Solo gave us. I will share more thoughts in an upcoming video and I thank you for calling this out. I haven't given up, but want to focus on where my passion lies....and that's software as well as doing interesting post processing (maps, 3d models, etc). Hope that makes sense and stay tuned. Take care.
Dennis Baldwin Awesome answer Denis. I really appreciate everything your doing and especially that your helping out at the scholastic level and introducing our future....to the future!!!! Thank you very much for the explanation....I definitely agree with you and I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me!!!! Keep up the great work Dennis 👍👍
What causes my phantom 3 stork plate to cause my gimbal overload red light to come on saying gimbal clamp is mounted off. How do I set my stork plate to phantom 3 standard where it want make gimbal overload show up in controller?
Does the Phantom offer no GPIOs at the camera mount? I thought they even have an API and other developer support. How do you make sure it doesn't drop during normal flight, let's say while flying a circle to look at the landing zone? edit: Ah I get it it's so it will work with any Multicopter. Then it's a clever idea! I have another idea. Why not use a hall sensor and a magnet that's mounted on a lever on the gimbal and passes the sensor only when the camera is pointing straight down. That way you already look at the payload through the camera, pan quickly left and right so the sensor gets triggered at least twice in a short time and the payload drops and you make sure you have visual confirmation of the drop.
I wish there were GPIO, but we don't have that with the Phantom. Good question regarding circling the landing zone. Right now the code looks for a discrete 360 rotation between 3 and 6 seconds. So if you're circling the landing area it will likely take a lot longer than this time window. I'll need to do some more testing to see if anything else triggers it. I like the hall sensor idea. Originally I thought of using the gimbal to close a circuit when the gimbal is pointed to -90 degrees. That may be another way to approach this but I wanted to try to do it without moving parts. I will do some testing over the weekend and share results. Thanks for the great feedback. Really like hearing these ideas. Take care.
Very cool. I've seen this implementation before. If only we could control the LEDs with 3rd party apps. It would be a nice solution. Thanks for sharing.
If you only knew how your research would help people 7 years after the video) Can I ask you to help me with one project? This is very important for survival
Wow, just watched you video. Very impressive. Would love to get involved. I'm a Swift programmer myself (App Store: DroneSpotz) and would like to help out!
Recently had a need for a similar mechanism that needed to be FC agnostic as well. We actually opted for separate control, using on board video for precision drops. I like the Arduino approach. We went with separate on-board control because phase 2 requires lower the item to dropped on a line (reel) and then dropping from the bottom of the line and reeling the line and drop mechanism back in.
Very cool idea. I don't know enough about video processing to pull that off. Would love to learn more about your approach. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Todd, I'm working on video precision detecting that I think that has the same principle of you precision drop. Would love to know more about your project and to obtain some additional information to my project. Do you think it would be possible to exchange some ideas with you ? Thanks!
There is a nice drop mechanism on thigaverse already just do a search. As you already know a pixhawk drone would be the way to go with 16 channels on the x8r it's really simple
Cool will see what I can find. Most of the ones I've built previously or found require an external signal to drop. Yes it's nice and easy with the X8R but unfortunately DroneBlocks is not compatible with Pixhawk aircraft....yet. The problem is we don't have the ability to easily control gimbal pitch, camera exposure, camera shutter with code in the world of APM/Pixhawk. We recently added support for 3DR Solo but unfortunately the market is limited compared to DJI....unfortunately. Thanks for the feedback. Much appreciated.
Dear Dennis,
This is very interesting project and i can already see wide range of applications that we could implement using your mechanism. Do you have a tutorial for beginner who wants to setup similar system with drones?
I am thinking of buying the Microbit and implementing your steps and would really appreciate if you already have a tutorial for this entire mechanism.
Thank you Dennis. I am always fascinated by your projects and try my best to implement those.
Best,,
Suman
Suman, thanks for the good words. This is still a work in progress. There was a lot of interference with the compass because of motors and vibrations. I'm looking at different ways to approach this. I will share more details in the near future.
Dennis have you had any experience with the 3dr solo? if so, your thoughts? Thanks for all you do Dennis! You have been an incredible asset to us all!
Sorry for the delayed reply and hope you're doing well. I love Solo. It's an awesome bird and the fact that it has Pixhawk makes it ever better. I'm hoping to make DroneBlocks compatible with it. We originally began work on it, but after 3DR stopped supporting it means that a lot less of them will be in the marketplace. So we've been focusing on DJI. That being said you can get them for super cheap now. Just wish I could use something other than a GoPro camera on it. I don't think you can go wrong for the money and I know there is an initiative to bring it back to life from some of the Pixhawk devs. Good luck and keep us posted on what you do.
Thanks Dennis! I bought one new for 200.00 and could not believe it! Are you still working with it? I haven't flown mine yet due to weather..Do you have a website so I can keep up with what you are doing?
Kevin
@Dennis Baldwin you could use a UART port on the flight controller triggering a solenoid replacing the servo, in my humble opinion it is a simpler solution - isnt it?
The only challenge is I wanted to get this working with P3/P4 and other DJI aircraft. In those scenarios there is no serial comm. The M100 does support it, but that's a much more expensive option that not many users will have access to. Keep the good thoughts coming.
This is awesome Denis. I love your channel and the work you do!!
But if I can be so bold as to ask....why have you stepped away from ardupilot? It seems from the outside that you have decided to step away from that and have been just concentrating on DJI and their "version" of what open source is ....which like you indicated that with the SDK they only allow limited third party contribution.
Not trying to give you a hard time Dennis and you don't owe me any explanation but I was just wondering.
Thank you for the comment and great question. I feel like I need to do an entire video explaining this....actually I may do so in the near future. There are many reasons I don't focus on Ardupilot as much, but the main one is that my focus is on education through software. I want to help bring young students into the world of programming drones. I started this with DroneBlocks and we will be extending the program to higher education. Originally DroneBlocks was written for DJI and then we added Solo support. The reason being is that we have programming blocks such as "pitch gimbal", "take photo", "record video" that can't easily be done with standard Ardupilot builds. Solo provided us a standard interface and it was very capable. Now that 3DR Solo is no longer supported we had to shift focus on DJI. I've been talking to a couple of the Solo devs and we may be bringing the project back to life. I hate being tied to DJI when all my focus has been on Ardupilot over the years. Think about an APM/Pixhawk build that has a standard gimbal which you can control via code, or take a photo via code. There is not standardization in the APM/Pixhawk world and that's what Solo gave us. I will share more thoughts in an upcoming video and I thank you for calling this out. I haven't given up, but want to focus on where my passion lies....and that's software as well as doing interesting post processing (maps, 3d models, etc). Hope that makes sense and stay tuned. Take care.
Dennis Baldwin
Awesome answer Denis. I really appreciate everything your doing and especially that your helping out at the scholastic level and introducing our future....to the future!!!! Thank you very much for the explanation....I definitely agree with you and I appreciate you taking the time to respond to me!!!!
Keep up the great work Dennis 👍👍
What causes my phantom 3 stork plate to cause my gimbal overload red light to come on saying gimbal clamp is mounted off. How do I set my stork plate to phantom 3 standard where it want make gimbal overload show up in controller?
Does the Phantom offer no GPIOs at the camera mount? I thought they even have an API and other developer support. How do you make sure it doesn't drop during normal flight, let's say while flying a circle to look at the landing zone?
edit: Ah I get it it's so it will work with any Multicopter. Then it's a clever idea! I have another idea. Why not use a hall sensor and a magnet that's mounted on a lever on the gimbal and passes the sensor only when the camera is pointing straight down. That way you already look at the payload through the camera, pan quickly left and right so the sensor gets triggered at least twice in a short time and the payload drops and you make sure you have visual confirmation of the drop.
I wish there were GPIO, but we don't have that with the Phantom. Good question regarding circling the landing zone. Right now the code looks for a discrete 360 rotation between 3 and 6 seconds. So if you're circling the landing area it will likely take a lot longer than this time window. I'll need to do some more testing to see if anything else triggers it.
I like the hall sensor idea. Originally I thought of using the gimbal to close a circuit when the gimbal is pointed to -90 degrees. That may be another way to approach this but I wanted to try to do it without moving parts. I will do some testing over the weekend and share results. Thanks for the great feedback. Really like hearing these ideas.
Take care.
i activate my siren from the c2 button on the tx using a light/dark resistor taped to the front lights of the p4.
Very cool. I've seen this implementation before. If only we could control the LEDs with 3rd party apps. It would be a nice solution. Thanks for sharing.
If you only knew how your research would help people 7 years after the video) Can I ask you to help me with one project? This is very important for survival
Excellent stuff ! When can I get one ?? :)
I am working on a 3D printable case and will share more details soon. Thanks for following along.
Good solution
Thanks. Appreciate the feedback.
I think you could shoot ground elevations using the same procedure.
gravity is the optical plummet, how stable and accurate is the instrument?
You don't need any processors on the dumb end, don't mind me speed is still slow on the upstream side because of gravity issues.
Interesting idea. I like what you're thinking. Will have to investigate some more in the future. Thanks for the comment.
Nice Work..:-)
Thanks. I hope to have an update soon. Take care.
Awesome :-)
Appreciate it. Hope all is well.
Wow, just watched you video. Very impressive. Would love to get involved. I'm a Swift programmer myself (App Store: DroneSpotz) and would like to help out!
Thank you. Let's continue the conversation via email :)
sagwa