Difference between revisions of "User:Rufus"

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Hi, I'm Chris Gough and I hail from from Canberra, Australia. Thank you for visiting my page here. I'm a software developer by trade, but I work as a manager for the Australian Government (Dept. of Environment). Among other things, my interest in Paparazzi is as a nice technical challenge to keep my sane after reading/writing documents and going to meetings all day.
= Project notes: Raspberry Pi ground control station =


I've not yet had any flights with paparazzi. I have acquired an EasyStar and had lots of practice - to the point where I can now launch/land reliably in adverse conditions, such as the tree-lined ridge across the road from my house. I also just finished assembling a "Boomerang 40" aileron trainer and converting it to electric power (~800W), and I intend to learn to fly that competently before using it (or something similar) as a UAV  platform after the EasyStar .
I want a cheap headless GCS that speaks to me (possibly via CB radio), keeps logs, and provides a convenient place for me to tinker with agents and such (development time) with a maximally simple setup at the field. I will probably want a build system (for reflashing firmware at the field) and integration with FPV video, but those jobs are for later.


I have a TWOG from CheBuzz, a pair of 2.4 Mhz zigbee modems and some 36MHz radio gear. With the help of [http://www.mannberg.co.uk/paparazzi/?p=5 this page] I seem to have my modems to working :). I plan to do AUTO1 and AUTO2 flights with the EasyStar by the end of the month (September 2009) or early October.
I started with a Raspberry pi (rpi) running debian squeeze, which is what I run on my field laptop, but that was a dead end. Ocaml on squeeze is 3.11.2 (with no backport available), and that version doesn't support ocamlopt on ARM architectures. So far I've learned that I should be on a wheeze-based distribution (ocaml > 3.11, supporting ocamlopt on ARM), and I probably want to utilise the hardware float so that means I'll move to raspbian next.


Longer term (hopefully by the end of Summer), I'd like to build a UAV that routinely patrols/surveys a moderately large area (farm) taking geo-referenced digital photographs, and develop a ground-based post-processing facility to stitch/authorectify/etc them to maintain raster layers in a geodatabase... machine learning is a bit of a hobby of mine, and I entertain the fantasy of eventually one day building an automated kangaroo/cow/plant detector.
http://www.raspbian.org/


I know a friendly farmer who will let me fly over their 300 Acre paddock, home to 90 cows (and probably as many kangaroos). I've started the process of learning what I have to do to make my surveys there safe and legal, and expect to have the necessary approvals in place by Christmas.  
My plan is to mudde through and get it working, then publish an install script that makes the install process repeatable. After that I might look into packaging, but I don't know much about that (yet).


But for now, my "UAV" is a rather odd looking small cardboard box with a USB socket, a (power) switch and some IR sensors on a coreflute stalk.
= About me =
 
I'm an open source UAV enthusuiast from Canberra (Australia), with a penchant for paparazzi and the guy behind [http://aerofu.com aerofu.com].
 
[[image:aerofu_logo.png]]
 
* My name is Chris Gough, some people call me Rufus (for reasons I don't fully understand).
* the best way to reach me is christopher (dot) d (dot) gough (at) gmail.com. But don't call me Christopher, only my mum does that (and then only when I'm in trouble) so it's creepy/weired. Call me Chris.
* my skype identity is christopher.d.gough, but it's not a good way to reach me.
* On GitHub I'm monkeypants, on eBay I'm monkeypants007.
* my phone number is (+61) 418441605 (a mobile).
 
I'm NOT this guy:
 
* http://www.sott.net/articles/show/205982-Meet-Lt-Col-Chris-Gough-Killing-by-Drone-and-Proud-of-It
 
I mostly fly fixed-wing planes and am slowly moving to STM32, but mostly still LPC.

Latest revision as of 17:43, 1 November 2012

Project notes: Raspberry Pi ground control station

I want a cheap headless GCS that speaks to me (possibly via CB radio), keeps logs, and provides a convenient place for me to tinker with agents and such (development time) with a maximally simple setup at the field. I will probably want a build system (for reflashing firmware at the field) and integration with FPV video, but those jobs are for later.

I started with a Raspberry pi (rpi) running debian squeeze, which is what I run on my field laptop, but that was a dead end. Ocaml on squeeze is 3.11.2 (with no backport available), and that version doesn't support ocamlopt on ARM architectures. So far I've learned that I should be on a wheeze-based distribution (ocaml > 3.11, supporting ocamlopt on ARM), and I probably want to utilise the hardware float so that means I'll move to raspbian next.

http://www.raspbian.org/

My plan is to mudde through and get it working, then publish an install script that makes the install process repeatable. After that I might look into packaging, but I don't know much about that (yet).

About me

I'm an open source UAV enthusuiast from Canberra (Australia), with a penchant for paparazzi and the guy behind aerofu.com.

Aerofu logo.png

  • My name is Chris Gough, some people call me Rufus (for reasons I don't fully understand).
  • the best way to reach me is christopher (dot) d (dot) gough (at) gmail.com. But don't call me Christopher, only my mum does that (and then only when I'm in trouble) so it's creepy/weired. Call me Chris.
  • my skype identity is christopher.d.gough, but it's not a good way to reach me.
  • On GitHub I'm monkeypants, on eBay I'm monkeypants007.
  • my phone number is (+61) 418441605 (a mobile).

I'm NOT this guy:

I mostly fly fixed-wing planes and am slowly moving to STM32, but mostly still LPC.