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Hi, the Chaos Radio Express 187 podcast http://cre.fm/cre187 (sorry podcast is in German), has good information about flying objects and drones (not just octocopters).

The Paparazzi project http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page provides the open source software modules to use.

Apparantly they build some "cheap drones" and provided them to the meteological community with quite success. Flying time was about 2 hours without a problem, so likely for your case its ideal.

A coward, but thats why I like to remain anonymous ;)

You may also want to check project Paparazzi home page. They make a great autopilot that has been used on a wide range of UAVs from small cheap ones to more expensive research projects. http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page

Flightgear has been used for ages for testing drone software .For example, the Paparazzi drone project has interfaces for flightgear to allow you to simulate a drone flying.

I used just such a setup for testing out the software and seeing how it works before I actually get round to building a drone. I know some people use it for development as well, so unless I'm missing something, this isn't really new?

I've been looking for a out of the box UAV project for some time now (or in fact just a land or water based one). The best I can find so far is : "paparazzi" at http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page - but it's still quite a bit of work to plug all the bits together (and right now I have very little spare tinkering time). Anybody got any other options ??

Paparazzi is an amazing system that is very powerful and very flexible. It is also completely open source and open hardware, generally considered a plus around here.

There are a couple of vendors that have popped up over the last couple of years. They have "kits" with everything you need to get flying. You still get the experience of putting it all together and learning to program the thing to do what you want, but you don't have to learn SMD soldering to get there.

The list can be found at: http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Get_Hardware

** Full disclosure - I operate one of the webstores on that list

Anyone know of open-source projects for controlling these things?

doh

from earlier post http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page

http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/Main_Page

Open source autopilot/software/hardware design for small UAVs. Check succes stories and links on their webpage for a quick overview of what (quite a lot!) can be reasonably easily achieved.

These guys have been at it for a long time and seem to have decent results already. Makes me wonder why they're testing a proprietary module, when they could hack an open source platform.

When talking about hardware, you have to mention the paparazzi open hardware project for UAVs. I'm part of the community and it's a great piece of hardware/open source software for autonomous vehicles.

If you know much about the state of UAVs these days, research and development is going mainly into autonomous vehicles. Human controllers are definitely in the loop, defining waypoints, orbits, and so forth, but they aren't being flown directly by pilots, unlike the current crop of *military* UAVs that are in operation right now. The goal of UAVs is to have the plane take off, fly a particular mission, do something, and then fly back and land. All without a pilot controlling it. This isn't some future thing. This is what UAVs in research labs are doing right now.

You can bet that the next generation of military UAVs are definitely unmanned and pilot-less, though not uncontrolled, agreed.

With commercial companies getting into UAV stuff for civilian purposes (monitoring land and crops, mapping developments for a contractor or something, etc), the FAA is probably right to worry. I am concerned that the FAA's typical over concern will negatively impact the hobby field where UAVs are being developed and flown at low altitudes for fun by quite a few rc computer hackers[1]. So many neat things are being done by hobbyists [2] and it would a real shame if the FAA shut them all down overly ridiculous concerns like terrorism.

[1] http://www.rcgroups.com/uav-unmanned-aerial-vehicles-238/
[2] http://paparazzi.enac.fr/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I'd rather buy a gumstix board and run Paparazzi. The project looks really cool, and open source hardware schematics and software is available.