A new member joined to the team.

For the new project I hired a highly skilled technician. Although with little experience in the subject, already demonstrates a great enthusiasm and confidence in the new quadcopter. In the figure the new member of the team is doing a technical analysis of the central box of the new quadcopter (take a look in the critical eye), which was followed by a crash test to check the strength of the material.

I2C communication problem between the engine controller "BL-Ctrl" and the Arduino Board.

I did a very little test program to try to use the engine controller "BL-Ctrl" from the Arduino board via the I2C protocol (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Wire). I made a small program to test the controller with the address 2 (rear engine) of the quadcopter and upload it to the Arduino board. The result is that the engine work for a few seconds and then stop. To go back to work I have to make a reset of the Arduino board. I do not know if the addresses of the controllers (0x29, 0x2A, 0x2B, 0x2C) are correct and I do not know if the code that implements the I2C communication is correct. The information that a I have got was from the file "twimaster.c" from the code of "FlightCtrl", but it is very difficult to find a way to implement the same code on the Arduino platform.

To see if someone could help me find more information about the I2C communication between the "BL-Ctrl" controllers and other devices like Arduino I put this problem in the MikroKopter forum.

I have just got the arduino board.

The kit with the arduino board (Duemilanove) has just arrived. It includes a booklet "Getting Started with Arduino" by Massimo Banzi. Probably for the "quadcopter" I'll use the arduino MEGA or arduino with Bluetooth. But for me to start doing some experiments this card works fine. I also discovered a book for beginners "The Complete Beginners Guide to The Arduino" by Mike McRoberts which is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

A new direction.

The aim of this project is to make the "quadcopter" fly by itself and receive instructions coming from the onboard computer, a laptop, a smart phone via Bluetooth or a wireless network communications using the IEEE 802.11 protocol or even the ZigBee protocol (IEEE 802.15.4).

One problem of the current "quadcopter" is that I must always have the radio control on, otherwise the "quadcopter" starts beeping which is quite annoying. To remove the noise I would have to modify the code of the flight controller which by itself wouldn't be that simple but also could damage it. As it is expensive this could mean another investment. Finally, it is difficult to expand the current "quadcopter" with new features.

So, I decided to start build a different model of the "quadcopter" from the scratch, but using the Arduino platform as flight controller, since it allows greater flexibility. Meanwhile I will try to solve the problems of the current "quadcopter". After a quick search on google I have found several projects that use that Arduino platform. Here are some of them: 

• Aeroquad 
• Quaduino-ng 
• Caspiquad
• Farshid's Weblog
• Project Quadcopter
• Wyvern Quadrotor Helicopter

Some small progress.

After several hours of trials to adjust the radio control to the quadcopter, the quadcopter rises and responds to the commands from the radio control. But for some reason I did not know the quadcopter gets out of control after some time. Therefore, the problem is in the quadcopter or in the radio. So, I'll have to ask someone to borrow another radio control to test with this quadcopter.

The problem is still not solved.

I did the upgrade to the latest version of the FlightCtrl Firmware, but the problem remains. An addicional problem is the lifetime of the battery. After 10 minutes the battery must be recharged which takes about 2 hours, so I need to buy another battery for making longer tests.

A lot of problems.

After some tests in open space, I have seen that the movements of the "quadcopter" become very unstable as after sometime it tends to yaw to the left. I have tried several times to calibrate the "quadcopter", but without success. I have checked again all the components to see if could find any trouble. I have also checked that all the data provided by the MikroKopter-Tool were within the expected values but everything was fine. The next step is to upgrade the Firmware of FlightCtrl to the latest version.