Serious homebuilding: Roll your own autopilot

So,

Lately I've been writing software for open source drones - Mainly an android application that serves as the 'ground control station' but a little bit of code for the autopilot itself. I recently received the following reply from a cool homebuilder in Romania. He's using these open source drone hobbyist autopilots (about $200) to serve as the autopilot on his homebuilt. I wouldn't have believed it but I thought ya'll might like to see his great pictures:

write up and photos

(Of course no safety can be guaranteed or even predicted for any of the APM or Andropilot code)

There's really no reason this wouldn't work in an RV... Just needs some testing.

Look at the Arducopter, open source and fixed-wing versions are actively maintained. http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-mega-home-page
No reason why it couldn't be made to work, but you would have to disable some of the R/C receiver signal logic and a few other things off the top of my head.

rocketbob said:

Look at the Arducopter, open source and fixed-wing versions are actively maintained. http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-mega-home-page
No reason why it couldn't be made to work, but you would have to disable some of the R/C receiver signal logic and a few other things off the top of my head.

Click to expand...

Hi Bob, yep - that's the project he used (though using the Arduplane version would be required). Someday I might try it in my RV, but I'd need a bunch of spare time considering I already have a perfectly good AP ;-).

Same boat here, just too many other projects and I already have a Trio ProPilot in my Rocket.