A quadcopter drone using the Intel Edison platform.
To greatly decrease the barrier to entry for writing custom drone applications by providing an x86, Linux based drone platform.
The intel edison board is an x86 SOC module with an easy to use interface for many peripherals (such as those needed to control a quadcopter). By combining this with Linux real-time thread scheduling we can make a drone platform which runs as a typical x86 application on Linux. This greatly lowers the bar required to write custom applications, develop the platform, or add peripherals to the drone.
The brain of the edison drone is an "Intel Edison Compute Module" (http://amzn.com/B00PTVSS4A). This is plugged in to a Series of SparkFun Blocks, starting with the Base block. The blocks used are:
These blocks snap together and require no additional wiring or soldering. It is recommended that you attach these with the additional hardware pack (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13187).
The following commands can be used to build:
git clone https://github.com/greghaynes/edisondrone.git
cd edisondrone
cmake -Dtest=on .
makeSimply run the edison-server binary generated from compilation on the Edison computer to start the drone. In its current state only debug information is output and no control is possile.
Make sure the code was built with -Dtest=on passed to the cmake command (see Building section for an example). You can then run:
./edisondrone-testThe Simulator runs a series of generated inputs fed in to the control code and then outputs data files which can be graphed using a tool like gnuplot.
Run the edisondrone-simulator-img to generate a gnuplot image (after running the commands in Compiling):
./edisondrone-simulator-img simulator.pngOr create a gnuplot graph on your own:
./edisondrone-simulator > simulator.dat
gnuplot < simulator.gnuplot > graph.pngYou can then view graph.png in any image viewing tool.