Autopilot UAV

The telemetry network layer has been reworked to use timestamped and tagged UDP datagrams. This avoids the problems with dropped TCP packets causing the entire data stream to be lost. The servo driver now supports high speed ("digital") servos from JR and Futaba on the Rev 2.4 boards. Rev 2.2 boards require hardware modifications to support the new servos. The Futaba PCM1024 radio format can be decoded in real time. All GUI codes have been wrapped into Fltk widgets for a more professional appearance.

The simulator and helicopter can now be flown with Futaba transmitter through our buddybox/trainer port interface. The simulator has been redesigned to be much more modular and now uses a typesafe vector math library. The flight controller has a SWIG interface. The rev2 prototype code is much more efficient and now longer jitters under high interrupt load.

This release adds an OpenGL helicopter simulator
for testing out the inertial measurement system
(IMU) and for calibrating the attitude/heading
reference (AHRS). The inertial data, either from
the simulator or from the IMU on the real
helicopter, feeds into a Kalman filter that can
run on the ground station or on the realtime
board.

This version is the second major restructuring of the code. Everything for the onboard system has been packaged into onboard/avr/mainloop.c and installs from there. As with 2.0, this requires the custom PCB or an STK500 with Mega163 hooked up with the same connections. The ground station does not work with the current output due to UART problems onboard.

The is the first major restructuring of the code and the first port to the
custom circuit boards. The Rev 1.0 circuits have been produced and hacked.
Static tests have been successful with the ./efis/gs program and the
./onboard/src/flybywire program. The onboard code has been split into a AVR
library and controller program. The Mega163 is the default architecture, since
that is what is socketed on the new PCBs. ADC is polled rather than interrupt
driven and is scaled to the internal voltage reference. A PID
(Proportional/Integral/Derivative) control loop library has been added.