CopterControl Progress Update

February 14, 2011

CopterControl is a new board from the OpenPilot Project and is aimed at really shaking things up in the small UAV market. It is becoming more and more clear that we will achieve this goal based on the recent testing of the development boards.

CopterControl was first mentioned in the OpenPilot Podcast Episode 1 [ http://www.openpilot.org/podcast-episode-1/ ] where a brief overview was given of the board and its goals. In this post I will give an update of how the testing is going and what we have achieved so far.

Just to recap, the CopterControl board is a new tiny, 4 layer, 6DoF AHRS with a STM32 Microprocessor. We like to think of it as OpenPilot lite but don’t be fooled by that moniker. It is one very capable board and has more power and features than boards that are much larger and more expensive.

A brief video overview of the board can be seen below.

[ https://vimeo.com/22438901 ]

So far we have tested QuadCopters, TriCopters and Hexacopters, all of which fly extremely well. Fixed-wing aircraft have also been flown with the powerful new board.

The two videos below show some of this testing, first QuadCopters:

[ https://vimeo.com/22221798 ]

Osnwt showing an example of attitude stabilization and bad attitude recovery on fixed wings:

[ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gt1ok7iSGDY ]

So testing is going very well. We still have some work left to do on the software side but development versions of the hardware have been ordered in low quantity for early adopters to get started. More information on the release of these will be available shortly.