[Paparazzi-devel] Another Paparazzi starter :-) ...

[E. Baeck]

Hi together,

 

just saw that Francisco put his PM to me in the list already, thanks Francisco !

 

A short introduction only: my job for living is a hard- and firmware developer since over 25 years (mostly assembler + ANSI-C and AVRs the last 5 years) and my hobbys are R/C helis since 20 years (8 years competitions) and R/C planes since 2 years. Another hobby is building little surveillance robots with wheels, not legs :-) but for the robots there is very few time remaining due to the activities with the planes and helis. Last year I began with aerial photography with my little T-Rex helicopter and at the same time I started with VP (Video Piloting a term from RCGroups) with my MPX TwinStar II. That means a pan/tilt video camera on the plane controlled via a headtracking device (Btw from switzerland :-) on video goggles (for the pilot or a second person) from the ground. Very nice experience.

 

For all this photo and video activities I searched for a homing device (Return To Launch Autopilot) for the case when the plane goes out of the reach of the R/C or in the case of another failsafe condition. Yes and so i met Paparazzi on the Web :-) ! As I'm more a software than a hardware developer I've decided to sign in in the Paparazzi hardware list and started to learn a little bit Linux :-) (unfortunately new for me). When the weather gets better again I've to check out another "autopilot" (I know that's not a real autopilot :-) on my TwinStar that lies on my workbench, a FMA FS8CPI Co-Pilot. But I'm still very curious how those thermopiles are really working. Oh yes, I nearly forgot another important project, the semiscale copy of the UAV Aerosonde, it should be the successor of my good old TwinStar when the electronics and cameras get bigger and heavier :-) and should be at least also the carrier for the Paparazzi hardware. Here a link to a running thread concerning this project (in german): http://www.rclineforum.de/forum/thread.php?threadid=139288&sid=&threadview=0&hilight=&hilightuser=&page=1

 

I hope I'm also able to contribute a little bit to the very exciting project Paparazzi in the future.

 

Greets, Erwin