Saturday, February 16, 2013

Open Pilot has the Answer

I found some videos from the open pilot group who have their code ported to the STM Discovery F3 board. There is a Quad Copter flying using one. There is a demo showing stuff on the screen. Progress is happening.

I was thinking, if I just use the existing open pilot stuff, then I only have to get the code working on the Android, so I only have to do half the work. Then I don't have to come up with a communication protocol either, since open pilot already has one. Hack a Day of course came to the rescue yesterday also. There is a link to using App Inventor to connect an Android to an Arduino. It seems to make everything easier.

I was thinking, I don't have an Android SDK on Linux, but I mostly use Linux for surfing and developing, it might be time to get it. Yesterday the Android Central podcast suggested getting the SDK has gotten even easier recently. I'll give it a shot and let you know. It is also supposed to be easier to develop on. The Linux ADT bundle is about 400MB zipped, not too bad. The instructions seem reasonable, unzip and run. Maybe when I get done with this post, I try it.

Looks like I'll have some experiences that I've been through be broadcast on Airplane Geeks podcast this week.  That will be fun, talking about my mentors, and opportunities I have given other folks. It was a little more challenging than I thought, trying to stay coherent reading the text. It might be something I'll look into in the future.