Slashdot Mirror
Domain: diydrones.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to diydrones.com.
Stories · 4
-
Ardupilot To Continue As Non-Profit (diydrones.com)
New submitter buck-yar writes: The open source unmanned aerial vehicle platform, Ardupilot, has announced its creation of a non-profit organization aimed to meet the needs of the diverse developer community. With 3DRobotics recently pulling their financial support for the Ardupilot project, the developers had to take a look at how the project would continue. Yesterday, Andrew Tridgell announced the developers will create a non-profit to oversee the project similar to other non-profits in the open source community as it continues to grow. The organization will oversee the management of the documentation, the auto-build and test servers and will help set priorities for future development. "Intel has well over 10 developers devoted to DroneCode projects including at least 2 working on Ardupilot full-time and a few others improving QGroundControl to work better with Ardupilot," developer Randy MacKay writes on an Ardupilot Arducopter APM Pixhawk News forum. While the non-profit ArduPilot project and consulting businesses will be separate entities, the dev team says they will help support each other. -
An Open Letter To Google Chairman Eric Schmidt On Drones
savuporo writes "A DC Area Drone User Group has posted an open letter in response to recent comments by Eric Schmidt about banning drones from private use. The closing section reads: 'Personally owned flying robots today have the power to change the balance of power between individuals and large bureaucracies in much the same way the Internet did in the past. And just as the military researchers who developed GPS for guiding munitions could never have imagined their technology would be used in the future to help people conduct health surveys in the world's poorest countries or help people find dates in the world's richest, there is a whole world of socially positive and banal applications for drones that are yet to be discovered. We should embrace this chance that technology provides instead of strangling these opportunities in their infancy. Our hope is that you and the rest of Google's leadership will embrace this pro-technology agenda in the future rather than seeking to stifle it. We would welcome the opportunity to speak further with you about this topic.'" -
Best Way To Build A DIY UAV?
Shojun writes "I am very interested in building my own UAV. Not just one that can fly around happily, but one that I can program to say, take photos every second as it does a barrel roll under a bus (ok, that part may be a pipe dream). I have enough embedded programming experience — it's the hardware which I'm uncertain about. I can go the kit way, and then build the remaining stuff, or get some Dollar Tree Foam boards and build it all. I'm in favor of ease, however. Once the plane is built, buying a dev board seems like a possibility, but I wonder whether it's overkill. Alternatively, if there was a How-to-build example on the net for such an activity that I could adapt, to the degree that I could then program in even completely hardcoded flight instructions, I can certainly take it from there. Thoughts? Has anyone here tried something like this before?" -
Can Open Source Give Comfort To the Enemy?
zlite writes "We make open source Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones), mostly for geomapping and other amateur uses. One of our problems is that most people think of UAVs as Scary Things, and despite our efforts to prove otherwise there's always the risk of regulatory crackdowns. We have amateur UAV participants from around the world, but now they've been joined by an Iranian in Tehran, who has made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag. My instinct is that we should welcome everyone, everywhere, but I'm sure some in Washington worry that this looks like helping an 'Axis of Evil' country make advanced weapons. They could shut us down with the stroke of a pen. My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?"