Parrot ARDrone (Augmented reality quadrocopter) on a PC

[CyberVillain]

Yeah, plus its use is pretty much limited to the Warthog only (Its ok with the drone too )
I'll have to check out the T16000M, its price is really low, I always get skeptic when mechanical hardware is that cheap

If you let go of the T16000M, will it always send X=0, Y=0 or will it send some garbage? The Saitek I use always send some garbage, since the drone responds even to the slightest of signals I have to use Dead zones, and this makes flying a bit sluggish..

[WiredEarp]

Pretty sure its always 0,0, although without low level readings of the actual outputs its hard to tell. The USB control panel applet always shows it dead centre and it doesn't strobe or misalign when you move the joystick. My old joystick I had to constantly correct, this one just 'sits' there when I fly. Dead zones suck as you say...

The warthog stick can be used with any sim tho, cant it? Its just a warthog configuration. Which is pretty good still for things like black shark (if I didn't have to worry about being a lefty).

[CyberVillain]

Yeah, its still a normal Joystick.. can be used with any DX app.. But the configuration is desinged for Warthog sims.
The problem with ARDrone is that if it sends even the slightest of movement to the Drone it will respond to it (If im hovering for example it will stop hovering, which means it will stop auto compensate and you have to be alert if its windy), so its more important in this scenario then in pc gaming

[CyberVillain]

bugsquish, how did my software work out for you?

[WiredEarp]

Yeah, its still a normal Joystick.. can be used with any DX app.. But the configuration is desinged for Warthog sims.
The problem with ARDrone is that if it sends even the slightest of movement to the Drone it will respond to it (If im hovering for example it will stop hovering, which means it will stop auto compensate and you have to be alert if its windy), so its more important in this scenario then in pc gaming

Cant you just set a dead zone on your stick to avoid that?
Theres also some application I used to use (cant remember its name now) that lets you bind your joystick buttons to keys or macros etc and lets you reconfigure anything you want. Really handy app.

The T16000M has pretty much zero dead zone when I use it, but if you let it go it seems to be pretty much at 0,0. I can take my hands off and hover in BF2 without touching it, couldn't do this with any of my previous sticks for any length of time. The price put me off at first as well, along with some comments that the buttons feel 'cheap', but whilet hey don't have a massive amount of 'click', they work fine. The biggest issue I have with it is that it doesn't have enough buttons on the stick itself. I'm about to buy another one actually and mod it to add another 3 buttons or so to the stick itself (rewiring the buttons from the base) and also i'm going to look at wiring up an external collective to the throttle for flying heli sims.

[CyberVillain]

Did some FPV flying today with my Drone at my girlfriends country house, very nice with the Sony HMZ, the sun does not bother you at all like when you are flying from the latop screen. I just whished the Drone had better PQ to match the Sony better
You can get a glimpse of my FPV rigg at 2:27

[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3hd3H-xH6s&hd=1[/youtube-hd]

Another one
[youtube-hd]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTj8Eg1vOJE&hd=1[/youtube-hd]

[brantlew]

Very cool. I need one of these now.

I think it would be a fun project to hook the yaw control of the copter to a head-tracking device. Maybe even the roll and pitch to control the steering with your head a bit. It might help the sensation of flying.

[CyberVillain]

Very cool. I need one of these now.

I think it would be a fun project to hook the yaw control of the copter to a head-tracking device. Maybe even the roll and pitch to control the steering with your head a bit. It might help the sensation of flying.

Thanks!

The drone has an internal IMU of some kind probably rubbish, but it does send the Yaw info in the navdata (I just dont present it in my GUI).
So you could with some work sync the Yaw on the drone and on the headtracker and get some kind of absolute positioning system

A better useage of head tracking would be to control the pan and tilt of the camera, such systems are available, but not for this toy, forthat kind of FPV you will have step up a notch to the big boys Quadrocopters. Also they use composite video sigmals so you need to convert it to HDMI to work with the Sony (Does the ST1080 have composite?)

[brantlew]

It doesn't seem like you would need an absolute yaw position. It would not matter if the copter is facing the same direction as the pilot. Just gyro yaw rotation rates from the head-tracker to set the rotational speed of the copter. And absolute pitch and roll values would make your head into a joystick. Your Sparkfun would work just fine.

[CyberVillain]

It doesn't seem like you would need an absolute yaw position. It would not matter if the copter is facing the same direction as the pilot. Just gyro yaw rotation rates from the head-tracker to set the rotational speed of the copter. And absolute pitch and roll values would make your head into a joystick. Your Sparkfun would work just fine.

the only problem is that the commands you send to the Drone are relative...

[brantlew]

the only problem is that the commands you send to the Drone are relative...

Of course. That's essentially how mouse emulation works as well. Think of FreePIE.

mouse.DeltaX = filters:delta(tracker.Yaw * 10);

Of course with a mouse the velocity is instantaneous whereas a physical system has to accelerate. So the copter controls would feel sort of "soft". With a telepresence system you always have that trade-off, but I think it would correlate well enough if you constrained your head-turning speed.

Edit: I guess that's not really correct. mouse.DeltaX is an instantaneous position change, not a velocity. But still I think you can feed instantaneous velocity samples to an analog control system and achieve reasonable results. Gyro sensors return instantaneous rotation rate as a raw sensor sample.

[cybereality]

Awesome!

[Okta]

Did some FPV flying today with my Drone at my girlfriends country house, very nice with the Sony HMZ, the sun does not bother you at all like when you are flying from the latop screen. I just whished the Drone had better PQ to match the Sony better
You can get a glimpse of my FPV rigg at 2:27

DId you know the parrot v2.0 with 720p camera is out? Are you planning to make your software compatible?

[CyberVillain]

Did some FPV flying today with my Drone at my girlfriends country house, very nice with the Sony HMZ, the sun does not bother you at all like when you are flying from the latop screen. I just whished the Drone had better PQ to match the Sony better
You can get a glimpse of my FPV rigg at 2:27

DId you know the parrot v2.0 with 720p camera is out? Are you planning to make your software compatible?

Yeah I know, the SDK is hard to compile for Windows so I dont know at this stage. I was hoping they would make an official .NET SDK, but the parrot guys are Linux dudes, so go figures.. I dont have the Cpp knowledge or time to get the Linux SDK to compile under Windows, so until someone makes a Windows SDK I wont support the 2.0

From what I heard its only the res thats gotten better, and only for recorded video, real time video still has the same res. And they havent fixed the problems from the 1.0 (Like buggy altitude control etc)