Advancements in UAV Land, The Bokode Project, and Some New Stuff
Advancements in our UAVs, a new optical tag system called the Bokode, and new products.
There are some really interesting things happening in the UAV community.
The DIYDrones crew and the Ardupilot are featured on last month's Make Magazine. The Ardupilot project is really taking off with new expansion boards, sensors, GPS modules, and more intelligent firmware.
Bill Premerlani's UAV Development platform is making huge advancements in its flight control firmware. Along with creating an algorithm for maintaining an accurate estimate of the direction cosine matrix, the UAV Devboard now has the ability to use 5 PWM inputs and 6 PWM outputs, truly opening the door for almost any UAV application.
The Bokode Project from MIT's Camera Culture group - a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. I really can't explain how cool this new technology is in a short blog post, so watch this video.
Onto new products:
Bill Premerlani's UAV Development platform is making huge advancements in its flight control firmware. Along with creating an algorithm for maintaining an accurate estimate of the direction cosine matrix, the UAV Devboard now has the ability to use 5 PWM inputs and 6 PWM outputs, truly opening the door for almost any UAV application.
The Bokode Project from MIT's Camera Culture group - a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. I really can't explain how cool this new technology is in a short blog post, so watch this video.
Onto new products:
The ADXL193 is a 250g accelerometer; this is the breakout board. If you happen to use the full scale range of the accelerometer please let us know what kind of project you are working on. We would love to see 250g's in action!
This is a really neat little board that we have been searching for for quite sometime. Uses a JPEG color camera and easy to use UART interface. Really simple and really small, imagine the possibilities!
BOB for the GP1A57HRJ00F Photo Interrupter.
These hoodies came from our printer with the incorrect logo. So if you're looking for a cheap large hoodie, this one has a fancy SparkFun logo on it. Gangsta.
A couple more projects:
Cornell University has been compiling ATMega microcontroller projects from their "Designing with Microcontrollers" class for a decade now. The list now boasts over 350 projects, many of which include SparkFun products. This years projects include a 3D mouse, Haptic appointment manager, fart detector (ah...college), tissue impedance biopsy system, and several interesting musical instruments.
Here is a fun project that uses the PIC-LCD board from Olimex to create stopwatch/timer. Nice work Dave!
A couple more projects:
Cornell University has been compiling ATMega microcontroller projects from their "Designing with Microcontrollers" class for a decade now. The list now boasts over 350 projects, many of which include SparkFun products. This years projects include a 3D mouse, Haptic appointment manager, fart detector (ah...college), tissue impedance biopsy system, and several interesting musical instruments.
Here is a fun project that uses the PIC-LCD board from Olimex to create stopwatch/timer. Nice work Dave!
