Update to flight computers

I now have the second flight computer, a beagle bone black.

The problem is that for some reason they install Angstrom on it as a default OS. Really!

As I am a Redhat person due to my professional work I have decided to migrate both the BBB and RPi over to using either a Fedora or CentOS distro.

Kitting out the airframe

I have started to kit out the airframe.

This is the 4s lipo (center battery) for the APM

Also there are 2 x 3s lipo (rebuilt from old laptop batteries) that are for the flight computers.

The main APM battery lasts for around 5 hours so I am also building a battery change over to switch to a backup battery if it runs low. I would like to achieve a total flight time of around 10 hours

    

ADS-B reciver is now working

A few weeks ago I bought some RTL receivers with a plan of using them to pick up the ADS-B transponders that all commercial aircraft in Australia must have.

After testing these units with MythTV as a TV broadcast receiver and finding that the supplied antenna was not good enough for the job I moved over to ADS-B.

Not expecting much, I was surprised when they started to pick up planes in the area

This was actually very easy to do with a program called dump1090.(instructions are at https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B_tFEQ4o1RoTdmtndE9nWmFGUnM/edit )

Next is to use this information to feed into the navigation computer for the start of an avoidance system