luminousbees

We put the best hw currently available (H7 FC, realtime telemetry Dhoot 1200 ESC, Li-Ion battery just to name few points) on this 100g fully ArduPilot supported quadcopter

Thanks! I'll do it, I've never visit Parallax site before

We use the same design in the big brother for 5" propellers and double the weight of ArduBee. We make this development for our main focus about performative drone for swarm choreographies, its 2 years working with the fleet testing everyday to improve the quality of the performance. We had a lot of crashed indoor, and the pcb never had serious harm. We do not race obviously or high speed onto the wall!

You have to consider under the selected IMU, in the center, there is the most of the mass, made by the single 18650 Li-Ion battery. This solution is working, ArduBee is already flying good with the low pass filter in the gyro sets at 110Hz, if vibration would be an issue I guess it cannot fly

https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/ardubee-a-ready-to-fly-micro...

I totally agree with you, it's the most compressed form, in a slim electronics layer, for the most lightweight design. Every grams are used for the best selected components, assembled with passion and fully supported by Ardupilot firmware.

With ArduBee initiative we are making our best to innovate creating our best solution for swarming, with micro drones, indoor and even outdoor, based on Ardupilot Open Source project. If you have a look at https://ardupilot.org/copter/ you could start to have an idea of the included potential.

Without catastrophic crashes, it's a flying PCB with the finest micro drone's build integrated in its frame.

About vibration dampening, if you look at the maiden flight here https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/ardubee-a-ready-to-fly-micro...

Don't you think the untuned ArduBee was flying already nicely?

The graph of the postfilter acc and gyro is not so bad, the new Dynamic Notch Filter technics in Ardupilot is working so good. Furthermore, the best in his class IMU is put in the center of the frame, where the single 18650 battery, the most of the mass, is fixed in place.

Thanks! this could be a great idea,the 2mm PCB could be an interesting option! We are devoted to 1.6mm PCB since the 5" version that weighs 220g and we haven't had any broken or issue on the PCB piece. The battery is well attached, fixed in 6 well distributed points on the PCB and aligned perfectly in the center of the 4 motors.

Yes carbon fiber its an amazing material for lightness and robustness, but we cannot see a way to innovate there with the usual separate parts and its needed cables. ArduBee its without a single wire, ready to fly, apart the motors wires. This in particular for micro drone is really a weakness in terms of flight time and aerodynamics.

Thank you so much khancyr! You are a well-known member in the ardupilot community your support is highly appreciated and if you have ideas or suggestions we would love to have your opinion before closing the new ArduBee prototypes in development

With great excitement we follow the feeback here on HN and we are happy to answer all your questions!

Besides posting here you're all also very much invited to submit your feedback via this google form and contribute with your ideas to the final version of ArduBee before starting the kickstarter: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfSv-mjhigMYmZsG03N...

I agree UWB system has good quality positioning, it's not affected by lights or smoke and it's quite cheap. The localization is processed on each Flight Control and it's integrated inside the Arudpilot firmware and passed to the Ardupilot EKF.

Thank you! Bitcraze is so small and lightweight, but the first version had 3 minutes of flight time. It have brush motors and it's not suited for outdoor. We'll update you about the real flight time asap the new motors arrive. Furthermore, ArduBee will be proposed as a plain board without motors and propellers, to enable every sort of selection and combinations of brushless motors and 3" props, offering full customization for many different approach, you can use top motors or under the base, for max endurance, max payload, max navigation performance or wind disturbance rejection.

Yes! Lighthouse positioning system from Valve for indoor positioning it's so interesting, swarm compatible, easier to setup, cheaper and higher precision!

UWB is our present solution, its already easily in the 10cm accuracy in LOS scenario, it also enables complex indoor space with different connected rooms you want to cover, and you could cover easily 30m between each beacons.

We are discussing the option to integrate the optical flow directly into the ArduBee base. If you have suggestions, your contribution is highly appreciated.

It's not so easy to stay under $200 if you mean all parts apart the RC radio. I mean 4 motors + 4 ESC BLHEli32 with telemetry + FC + WIFI, compass, 1 down-facing rangefinder, .. in particular for the FC if you select these components with quality chips and sensors it starts to be quite challenging. Furthermore, if you would like to develop swarm applications the time spent to create the fleet is not to be underestimated. Last plus its a platform with 1 single common 18650 LI-Ion battery for higher flight time in comparison to the usual LiPo.

We are trying to shape ArduBee as an excellent platform for 100g-200g micro uav develop and to enable urban swarm experimentations, indoor and outdoor!

Hi! Makers from ArduBee here. Thanks a lot for this comment! As we have never heared of HoverflyOpen and we couldn't find much more than on this site, we can not really comment on it. But if you have more information, we would love to hear about it! Just based on the facts we can get from that site, it seems a quite priced Flight controller, where you do not know in which flight stack you could use it. Also you can not see how large the community of developers is around it. Arudupilot, which is our foundation for ArduBee, is Open Source and with a large user base and active, high talented developers working constantly on maintenance and improvements. ArduBee not only is a Flight controller (based on Ardupilot) but it's a full micro uav platform, with 4 x ESC BLHEli32 with telemetry, WIFI ESP8266, Li-Ion based with 18650 holders from easily swaps the battery, 1 facing down rangefinder for low height altitude, and last generation inertial sensors

I agree bitcraze its a great nano drone, but the first version has 3 minutes flight time and it can not be used outdoor, furthermore, Ardupilot is far more advanced and offers a lot more potential and with a huge community of experts, developers and user

Till 1 year ago it has been a great concern, especially for small drone. Now thanks to andyp1per, new Ardupilot dev, we have amazing results with dynamic filtering gyroscope noise, we could even track the mechanical noise peak based on actual RPM or live FFT.

Harmonic Notch Filter in Ardupilot https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-imu-notch-filtering...

new and ongoing development

https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/13121

https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/14010

Thanks! we are working hard on the best protection+landing, searching for the lightest solution and it will be all around the propellers. We use since 2 years its bigger brother (220g) in a swarm system for choreographies with medium acceleration/speed autonomous navigation, during all the intense flying sessions we had quite some crashes but the harm on the board has been very low.

integration of all the different parts on board in a single base: WIFI with ESP8266 WiFi, brushless motors, 4x ESC last generation BLHeli32 with telemetry and DSHOOT up to 2400 -- FlighControl -- IMU -- baro -- compass -- power system with 1 easily swappable Li-Ion 18650 for maximum flight time -- rangeFinder for accurate low height navigation 0-3m -- sdcard slot for Log -- connector for common RC radio and telemetry + connector for all the external add-ons like GPS, indoor positioning system, optical flow, 8 horizontal rangefinder for collision advoiance,... All these hw connected with the Ardupilot features. Furthermore, for small copter its very hard to have good flight time, ArduBee try to have very good flight time, safe and ready for makers to develop, supported by one of the best Open Source project for drone, Ardupilot. It has been developed to be used safely for urban swarm robotics application development, education, creativity!

https://ardupilot.org/copter/

ESP8266 with Ardupilot (telemetry and control) https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-esp8266-telemetry.h...

BLHeli_32 ESC Telemetryhttps://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-dshot-blheli32-tele...