A µC for a UAV

[Anonymous No.18438]

I have an embedded electronics question, /diy/.

I'm currently designing the control board for a small UAV that I'm building, but I'm having trouble deciding what µC to use. I need something that's powerful enough to run an EKF and maybe some very simple vision processing, but isn't so complicated that programming isn't all over my head. Suggestions and feedback would be appreciated.

[Anonymous No.18500]

Bump.

[Anonymous No.18521]

Have you looked into these?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ5TajZYW6Y

It's the same chips that we used for my aero engineering intern project.

[Anonymous No.18527]

>>18521
oh you, anon

[EV Nutter !!yqPDEZ7s4tw No.18546]

>>18500
Why design when http://diydrones.com/notes/ArduPilot does damn near everything already?

[Anonymous No.18556]

i'm no help myself, but have you looked on

diydrones.com

for help?

[OP No.18559]

>>18546
Didn't we already have this discussion in yesterday's thread? Anyhow, ATmega is not fast enough for vision processing. I think ArduPilot does EKR though... or maybe just complementary. Never looked too carefully at the code.

[Radiofag No.18572]

Yeaahhhh. I'm pure analog. I have yet to even update to 1975.

I use a Weller WES51 for christsake.

Good luck.

[Anonymous No.18748]

How about Maple?

Excerpt from page:
>If you're familiar with Arduino then you'll recognize the shape of the board, in fact the Maple is designed to be Arduino compatible and not just at the hardware level! The Maple IDE will make Processing/Arduino programmers feel right at home. By swapping the popular "avr-gcc" compiler with CodeSourcery's "arm-non-eabi-gcc," LeafLabs manages to provide a nearly identical programming experience to Arduino despite targeting a completely different architecture.

Programming and hardware in common with Arduino, but using an ARM Cortex-M3? Sounds like a good deal.

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10664

[OP No.18766]

>>18748
I've heard of Maple... I don't really like the pseudo-C of Arduino. Would rather code in straight C, which I suppose I could do without the Maple libraries. I'm looking at processors to put on a custom board, anyhow. I'm looking at the ST ARM chips that the Maple uses...

[Anonymous No.18903]

>>18766
Surface mount or DIP? Because if you are doing surface mount then maybe you should look at some of the processors they have on TI like the Stellaris microcontrollers. They are also ARM Cortex-M3.

Here are some links to the TI resources (tons of literature) on a pretty beefy one and to Digi-Key where you can pick it up for less than $10.

http://www.ti.com/product/lm3s1620

http://search.digikey.com/us/en/products/LM3S1620-IBZ25-A2/296-25677-ND/2207574

[Anonymous No.18951]

>>18903
SMT; attached is my earlier non-working prototype of a board that uses the Parallax Propeller.

I *have* been sucking TI's rhetorical MSP430 cock for a long time, and it's all very well documented, but it all seems so complex. I had to leaf through pages just to figure out ePWM. It's a good suggestion though; I'll keep it in mind.

[muon No.18967]

>>18951
If you're having trouble implementing stuff using the reference manual, look for an app note instead.

[Anonymous No.19048]

>>18951
If you were looking at putting some quadrature encoders on there for measuring motor rotational speed then there are some Stellaris uC on there that have inputs for those.

The one I linked here >>18903 only has one, but there are others with at least two. Could possibly multiplex them and process them sequentially?