First Power Up
posted by michael @ 10:58pm, Sunday 31 May 2009.
I connected the IRV, IRH the servos the PPM encoder to the Receiver and the PPZ, the FTDI to the Serial port on the PPZ and the USB cable to the FTDI Board.
I then mounted the IRH on top of the aircraft with a small wooden dowel. I mounted the IRV to the side of the air plane. I used a piece of popcicle stick inside the plane to give my zip tie some foundation.
I soldered a red and black cable to the PPZ board and then to the connector that plugged into battery 10.5 V.
I plugged the Servos up as:
srv0 - Airelons
srv2 - throttle
srv3 - elevators
srv4 - rudders
The PPM encoder was channel 1 on the PPM encoder to channel one on the reciever through 4, then channel 8 on the encoder was connected to channel 6 on the receiver which is the MODE signal.
You'll notice that I created a new cable with sheathing. This should add some strength to the cable along with easier cable management and looks.
I connected everything up, using the FTDI connector to connect to my Ubuntu box via the USB port. I executed dmesg from the ubuntu command port to see what port I was connected to and saw it was ttyUSB00 and smelled smoke. Actually I noticed a hint of ode de burn. It did seem to be coming from the PPZ Board, but I'm not sure if anything actually burnt on the board or not.
That said i'm getting a steady blinking Red LED, I think about every 3 seconds and a green LED that blinks every second.
I still need to read up on the manual to determine just how to program the unit and how to use the ground station to actually see the status of the Aircraft.
So I have some more research to do.
Cabling up
posted by michael @ 9:55pm, Sunday 31 May 2009.
I decisde to add the PPM encoder intothe mix so I picked that up as well. I took a couple of female to female servo extenders and cutthem in half and soldered them to the PPM encoder boad. this will allow me to connect to any reciever, PCM or PPM micro or regular size and reencode the signal to the PPZ. It saves me the trouble of hacking the reciever to find the right place to solder a cable for the PPM signal.
I cut them in half:
Then I soldered them to the PPM Board. I actually needed one more for the MODE signal from the controller:
Here is the blank PPM Encoder (Its really blurry, sorry about that, I was drinking and that how I saw it :-) )
Here it is with the connectors:
Next I added a 3 pin male to male connector to the servo cables for the PPZ to the Servo.
Added Heat Shrink:
And soldered:
The Initial Connections
posted by michael @ 10:14pm, Sunday 3 May 2009.
First things first, let’s get everything out and inventory it. It seems some of the pictures are a little blurry. I took them with my Blackberry. I'll try to replace them as I can.
Tiny 2.11 Main board:
XBee 9 Pro Radios:
Infrared boards:
PPM Encoder board (Required so we can use any transmitter / reciever we want, not just a PPM Pair)
Extra Cables for the servo connections and for connecting the PPM Encoder to the Tiny
Here is the assembled product. Well it’s only what could be assembled out of the package. It shows the two IR boards IRH and IRV plugged into their sockets and the USB Cable and the XBee UAV Radio plugged in. The XBee is sitting on static foam to keep anything bad from happening to it. The layout diagram for what plugs into what sockets can be found here: http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Tiny_v2#Pinout
The XBee radio for the base station plugs into its USB Converter board:
That is it in a nutshell. These will be the initial pieces I use to construct my UAV. I will walk through the steps I take to assemble.
Since I bought my Tiny as a kit from PPUAV, it was pre programmed, so I'm not going to have to install boot loader, configure the GPS or configure the XBee Radios. After this first UAV I may build one from scratch. If I do I will go over the details on how to do this then.