Building an embedded circuit for a UAV

[AJ]

Hi,

I have deleted posts with obscenities and taken action to try to prevent the same thing happening again - let's try to get this back on topic, please. Apologies for any loss of continuity. Thread left open for now in the hope that some further useful replies may be added.

Cheers,
Adam

[AndrewAPrice]

I'm sorry syntropy for sounding crazy. I didn't know where I start so my question was if the components I chose would work together. Then I tried FPGAs (I found a few hobby communities that sounded kind of promising).

I know I sounded like a beginner on the forum that asks a bunch of questions without doing their research and make themselves sound like fools, so I apologize. I assure you I did research (although up the wrong tree several times) before each post.

Back on topic:
I think Arduino is a good choice to work along side the Beagleboard, and I've found some other projects that used them together. The starter kit is inexpensive (and comes with a thermometer - interesting to have even though it's not my goal), there is a 3-direction accelerometer (which by measuring gravity acts as a 2D gyro), and guides on getting GPS receivers working with it. So I'll start with the Arduino kit and leave the Beagleboard/webcam/transmitter until later when I have the flying logic sorted out.

One more thing I'm unsure of is measuring battery level. I read that two methods of doing this is by measuring voltage (inaccurate) or measuring amp-hours. What sort of component would I be looking for that can measure the amp-hours of a battery? And secondly, won't the measurement be dependent on the load of the battery?

[AJ]

Hi,

I don't know if you've seen this starter kit, but it looks like someone's made a more UAV-friendly Arduino.

Cheers,
Adam

[earlz]

I think NASA used the 8086, not the 80386.

Today, in newer designs.. they probably use radiation hardened designs, and something with a little more oomph.

Radiation hardening takes a lot of time though, so in a 5-10 years you may see the processors today in radiation hardened form... but even that may not be possible because our processors of today work much faster and thus have a much higher chance of having a bit flipped by radiation.

[Owen]

ESA are a fan of a radhard version of the Leon2-FT ("Fault Tolerant") SPARC v8 processor, which can clock at about 400MHz