Special Project. Need ultra small computer for flight control

A

Atomic178

n00b
Joined
Jan 9, 2010
Messages
28
So I go to the University of Alabama and am entering my senior year in aerospace engineering. We are thinking of ideas for a senior design project, and one that has peaked a lot of peoples interest is an autonomous flight aircraft. Our plan is to write the software to control a model RC plane (roughly 5-6 foot wingspan).

Our first thought was to buy a processor and hardware package that is meant to do this, but I have a feeling that it will be prohibitively expensive and not in the spirit of this project. I came up with the suggestion of using some of the open-source flight control software packages out there and running it on, basically a striped down PC inside the plane. Obviously this presents several problems since the fuselage of the plane is maybe 6"x6" crossection so fitting in the hardware will be difficult, never mind the coding challenges.

The plane will be battery powered (although me a friend are working on making a miniature alternator for it to charge the batteries in flight for extended time) so power usage is a premium. Processing requirements would be easily handled by any off the shelf proc (im guessing), but the power requirement is the most important.

What I basically need is a hardware list of stuff that would be cheap enough and effective enough to run some C++ control algorithms to fly this thing. I was thinking maybe the intel atom (although I haven't seen this for retail?) or some other ultra-low power usage processor. A nano style motherboard and enough memory to get the job done. A SSD hard drive would be much preferred because of weight, power, and size. We would probably use a striped down version of linux or something similar. All I am concerned with at this point is the hardware requirements.

Im not really sure what all would be needed or if the stuff is out there in the market. Any suggestions that anyone can make in terms of hardware would be very useful and appreciated. Lets say no more than $750 just to throw a number out there, but of course the cheaper the better.

Thanks,
Richard

Also, if anyone would like to donate any hardware or anything you think we could use to this project for the university send me a message.
 
Well there are many choices.

If you want the full x86 capability the VIA EPIA PX10000g could be a good choice

Otherwise and if power and size are biggest concern, I would go with a beagleboard or a gumstix board

There are some small ssds that are smaller than an USB stick. Also you could use an USB stick for storage since I guess you don't need too much space.

I was considering a beagleboard for a wereable computer project but sponsorship was called off. It's a very powerful option and it powers the openpandora.

Let us know how it goes
 
The Little Via's are what came to mind for me as well.. You can buy smaller, but I don't think you can buy something else that will be as easy for you to work with (x86). Also a x18m is going to probably be the physically lightest ssd you can get without using some sort of flash memory.

One other thing you may consider if you really wanted to make it homebrew style is canabalize one of the early dell mini 9's or EEE pc's that use the little ssd's. You may even consider an intel board with a z-u130 ssd (its a little usb flash ssd that connects direct to the motherboard via usb header) if an itx FF isnt too big.
 
Hmm, perhaps you should look into Arduino kits. I don't know if they would provide enough power or versatility for what you want but if they will you'll get a small package with light power requirements.
 
There are lot of people doing flight control as a hobby. Check out http://diydrones.com/ and specifically the ArduPilot project hosted there. It's a full open source autopilot that runs on the Arduino open hardware platform.

I highly doubt that you want to use an x86 board for your project. You should investigate the various ARM offerings. x86 is rarely the best option for embedded applications unless you absolutely need to run Windows for some reason.

You can get a complete 70 Mhz ARM Cortex M3 system for peanuts. The LPCXpresso development kit for the LPC1343 includes target board, jtag (program + debug) board, and compiler/toolchain all for $30. http://ics.nxp.com/lpcxpresso/

The original avionics processor in the F-16 did something like 2 MIPS. The ARM Cortex M3 in the LPC1343 does around 100 MIPS.

Move up to a BeagleBoard if you need more power. They're a 700 Mhz ARM Cortex A8 plus 500 Mhz DSP on a 4"x4" board with meager power requirements. http://beagleboard.org/

TI is sampling OMAP 4 boards now too. Since you're at university maybe you can get a professor to call the local TI distributer and score one for you. The OMAP4440 boards have a 1 Ghz dual core Cortex A9 with DSP.
 
Yea, I think you should try to use a USB stick instead of a SSD. Those are very light and I think a 32gb one should be more than enough.
 
I used to work with small industrial computers all the time. We used pc/104 boards for mobile equipment. The plus side of this was that there are also pc/104 daughter boards that have full motion control and sensor I/O built on the board. Im not sure how cheap they were because i was working on research/government projects in a lab, but they were made by a company called Delta Tau. The big plus is that they run off of 12v power.

http://www.deltatau.com/Common/products/pc104.asp?connectionStr=release&node=id110
 
I just peeked around on their website, and it looks like they are a quote only type of place.
Im guessing $$$$.

But PC/104 is a embedded computer platform, just check it out on Wikipedia. Or go directly to the consortium website http://www.pc104.org/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top