This past week, Radu and Drew worked through the details of setting up PWM-based servo control on the Arduino. This gives us robust control over servos from our occam-pi based programming environment without having to interrupt our execution every 20ms to update a servo.

Here, the Science Dinosaur demonstrates how things work.

Radu and Drew’s work is “foundational,” in that it lays foundations for other projects. (We’re excited about moving on to some more interesting explorations shortly.) The servo control is absolutely necessary for another summer project we have going: the <a href=”http://rockalypse.org/blogs/flyinggator/”>Flying Gator UAV</a>. This flying robot (an “unmanned aerial vehicle”) is being custom built by Ian, and Ian and Anthony are developing the control system in occam-pi on the ArduPilot Mega. This combination gives us a lot of real-time safety, which we hope translates to “no surprises” when we are actually executing our code on a functioning UAV.

The nice thing about the ArduPilot is that is has a built-in hardware override, so that even if your code goes wrong, you can take control over your aircraft with a radio.

Here, you can see Ian taking the fuselage (that means “body” in airplane-speak) out for a test spin. Our aircraft is incredibly overpowered, it turns out.

You can follow an aggregation of all the students’ work at planet.rockalypse.org.