Mainboard with chips?

Crazy weekend!  I was sweating at one point.

My lovely copy of Visual Studio Express hung during the deployment to the ArgonR1 mainboard.  Not to worry, reboot the computer and ArgonR1 and then deploy again.  Wrong.

The laptop wouldn't talk to the ArgonR1.  Was it fried?  Oh no!

I read on the forums it was best to re-flash the ArgonR1's firmware.  Great, downloaded the firmware and was ready to reset using Microsoft's MFDeploy.

Oh no, MFDeploy could not talk to the mainboard!  How then to recover?

All drivers deleted and re-installed, computer rebooted and still no joy!

Saturday blown, Sunday I was super worried.  Was the board dead?

I inspected the board just to see if there was something physically wrong with it ... that was the trick!!!

TOP TIP:  If your Gadgeteer Mainboard won't accept the deployment then do:

1. Disconnect your Mainboard from it's power source
2. Disconnect all modules ... except the computer power & communication module of course :)
3. Power up the board and all will be good

Then board was the talking to MFDeploy, yea!  It was alive, I was very happy!  

With MFDeploy you can delete the current deployment, haha top idea!  Given there was some weird half deployment on the board that seemed a top idea :)

Then Visual Studio was as happy as me and was uploading programs to the ArgonR1 again :)

Excellent, I didn't have to re-flash the firmware or any other of those "risky" style operations, how fantastic.  

I love this little ArgonR1 board :)

First Gadgeteer Program

I should have gone to bed, I was too excited to create my first Gadgeteer Program on the Argon R1 board ... here's the result :)

Yea, electronics arrive!!!

Woop woop, the electronics are here!!!  That Argon R1 is a thing of beauty :)

Time to start learning :)

Also, Love Electronics have been a top company.

Communications has been fantastic!!!  Answering questions, keeping me informed on the delivery and being genuinely nice all round.

A pleasure buying from them! 

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 :)

Gyroscope Arrived

First package from Love Electronics has arrived.

I'm now the happy owner of a 3-Axis Gyroscope and super looking forward to Love Electronic's Argon R1 arriving sometime tomorrow!

PC setting up

Good news, I've placed the order with Love Electronics for the Argon R1, a bunch of sensors and some other tiddly bits to get myself going!  Happy days :)

Time for a bit of action, let's get the computer set up.

I've not coded for about 3 years.  I do miss it a bit so it'll be lovely to get back into the swing of it again.  

Time to install my sweet heart Visual Studio.  Simply the best development platform I've ever used!

It's just amazing Microsoft have a free version called "Express", well done! Yes a thank you to Microsoft is needed otherwise for this project I'd have to shell out £500 for Visual Studio and other (optional) £300 for the MSDN.  

FYI, (start playing the violin) back in 1999 I paid £80 for a student licence of Visual Studio version 6, that was a lot of money/pints for a student to give up :)

VS Express C# installed, tick.  What next?

Well as I discovered there's two further parts you need from Mircrosoft: the .Net MicroFrame SDK and the Gadgeteer Core.  Silly monkey forgot to install the Gadgeteer Core :)

Next is the SDKs from the manufacturers for their electronics.  I installed them from Love Electronics', GHI and Seeed, why not the others might be useful one day!

Easy evening!  Even had a bit of time for some fun Gadget layout :)

Which Gadgeteer Board?

Time for a break from the motors and ESC research into something more comfortable :)

The Options

There's a few manufacturers I found doing Gadgeteer Mainboards, namely: GHI Electronics, Love Electronics and Sytech Electronics.

What distinguishes the boards are three factors: Processing Power, Memory and Connectivity to other Gadgeteer modules (i.e. sensors, switches, etc).

There is of course the cost.  These boards are a bit of money but nothing prohibitively expensive, so I'll ignore the cost and buy the best one for me.

BTW, there are quite a few companies creating Gadgeteer modules and they are all meant to work with any mainboard.

So what are the best offerings from these companies:

• GHI's FEZ Spider = $120 (USD) ~ £75
• Love's Argon R1 = £70
• Sytech's Nano = £70

They are all lovely boards.  For me, I'm going for the Love Electronics product.  Why?

Speed

The Spider and Nano runs at 200MHz where the Argon R1 is 120MHz, it's down on power yet that's not everything.

The drone will have an autopilot program that will be complex to write however I believe the number crunching won't be too heavy.

It is only basic simple Newton motion mathematics.  I'm not decompressing video or calculating molecule interactions.

120MHz will be great for my drone :)  Fingers crossed!

FYI, it's still so hard to understand how much "real" processing you'll get per MHz.  All the above buy their chips from NXP who implement the ARM processor version 7.  I dug around a bit, found out loads on each boards processor (won't bore you) however ultimately you never know ... will be run trying :)

Memory

This is where the Love Electronic's product wins.  FYI, there are two types of memory: RAM for your processor as a temporary storage and Flash for storage after power down.

• Nano has 8MB of RAM and 8MB of Flash
• Spider has 16MB of RAM and 4.5MB of Flash
• Argon R1 has 32MB of RAM and 128MB of Flash

OK, with the Nano and Spider I could get an SD memory card and write data to that.  That's a pain, more coding and another connector taken for the SD card module.

Even if I could be bothered, the Argon R1 still has double the RAM.  I like the sound of that.

My program might not need mega data processing however I'm always surprised how much RAM one needs. Better safe than sorry. Thank you Love Electronics!

Connectors

In terms of connectors, the drone will need many for all the sensors.  As this is my fun time R&D project I don't know how many sensors I need.

At worst I'll need to put multiple sensors on each of the Quadcopter's arms ... that's 4x gyroscopes, 4x accelerometer and a GPS. Plus it will need wireless comms to get the beckon's GPS location.  That's a lot of sensors!

Also a kill button would be important for safely plus later the ultrasonics for landing.

Ummm, I need a lot of connectors and none of the boards have enough.  I will have to think of a clever way around however for now best to get as many connectors as possible.

What I found on connectors:

• Nano is a little low on Gadgeteer connectors at 10 connectors
• Both Love Electronics and GHI has 14 each and I believe with the same distribution of interfaces.

Summary

The race was between GHI's Spider and Love Electronics' Argon R1, sorry Nano.

The Spider probably has more processing grunt however the Argon R1 has double the RAM and over 28x more Flash memory.

The only extra on GHI is the "Premium" pack.  It allow you to do some low level programming however I really can't see myself wanting to do that :)

Yes for me with all that memory, Love Electronics has it with the Argon R1 ... sorry if I was RAMing the message home :)