MEP EP#22

Published: June 30, 2016, 3:48 a.m.

Podcast Notes

  • Scott Shawcroft of Chickadee Tech is our guest on this weeks podcast. He is working on a modular flight control system called polystack. It has 13 different boards that can be stacked together. Similar to shields for the Arduino platform. See Figure 1.
  • Scott is down here in Houston visiting MacroFab to see his production run being built and working on his test fixture worked correctly.  See figure 2.
  • Seattle Multi Rotors is the group Scott is a part of.
  • The software stack is based of off Beta Flight which is a fork of Clean Flight which is a fork of BaseFlight. The very first flight controllers where based of the Wii Nunchuck. Scott uses custom pin mappings and uses a larger ST MCU which required another fork.
  • Scott got into Quadcoptors after watching the video Crash Session!!! His first quad was a from Flite Test.
  • The Tiny Whoop is a small FPV quad that is easy to build.
  • Chickadee Tech is Scott's first step into the hardware world. His first build was a lap timer using the radio strength signal. Scott self taught himself KiCad.
  • AutoDesk purchased CadSoft from Farnell. Autodesk EAGLE - The perfect tool to designing stuff for PIC16MEGA32u4.
  • The FR4 Machine Shield we mentioned in a previous podcast has a kickstarter now. It is a Arduino “shield” CNC machine. It comes on a 18” x 22” PCB panel. Motor controllers are called “Swap Drives”. Driver chips are on PCB cards that go into edge connectors.
  • The FAA released new rules for operating rules for unmanned aircraft (Quads).

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!