Time to lock down the design?

Time to take stock!!!

Lots of learning over the last 5 days.  There's a lot in my head right now, many thoughts about the pilot control of the drone ... must write that down.

The electronics coming which will be fun, there's more learning there!  Last part of the puzzle is connecting the Electronic Speed Control (ESC) to the Gadgeteer Mainboard.  Definitely do-able, so I'm not worried.

Once that is done, time to lock down the design.  I can't believe in 5 days this has gone from impossible to possible.

What's Needed in an Airframe?

Here's a few things I reckon I need ... will be fun to look back in a month and see how it has changed!

• Lightweight ... I can't afford Carbon Fibre so Aluminium looks good
• Strong ... one I don't want it to break on the first go!
• Structural Integrity -  I want to minimise vibrations ... that will do the sensors no good.
• Storage ... somewhere to hold the electronics, batteries and camera

Sounds a tall order ... time for more research!

I reckon the Motors and ESCs now not hard to decide on after yesterday!

The final electronics are tricky to decide.  I have a theoretical idea on how many sensors are needed however that all depends on how the real machine flies.  Let's just have some fun :)

Third Task - Control Electronics ... ummm not a clue!

Now this I thought would be hard, I need some clever electronics!!!

On a quick trawl of the net I wasn't much further.  Where to look?  Could this be the hurdle that makes this impossible?

I have no clue, I've check out what robot hobbyists do.  They have something called Ardurino, I'm not sure what that is all about.  It seems low level digital processing, I could be wrong.

I have a feeling I will need some good processing power, surely building an Autopilot system needs some fancy code?

Then after looking around, BREAK THROUGH!!!!

Microsoft has this great thing called Gadgeteer!!!! It's simple hardware system based around Micro .Net Framework.  Fantastic!!!

I'm totally in love with this!!! You buy a small battery powered motherboard then get whatever extras you need, e.g. sensors, motor controllers, wireless modules, etc. etc..

Plug it together, write your code and you have your system!!

Best of all you can do Object Orientated code ... my brain loves that, for this super complicated autopilot system being OO will save me so much heartache.

Yes, it's all C# too, haha my favourite of  favourite languages an in Visual Studio too, oh I'm such a lucky boy :)