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You're reading from  Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

Product typeBook
Published inDec 2017
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781786469168
Edition1st Edition
Concepts
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Author (1)
Ty Audronis
Ty Audronis
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Ty Audronis

Ty Audronis has been called a "technology-age renaissance man." Hes a professional drone pilot, post-production specialist in the entertainment and media industries, a highly experienced interactive game developer, and an accomplished digital artist. Hes worked for companies ranging from frog Design to California Academy of Sciences in roles where hes worn many hats. Tys been programming software and games since 1981 (when he was 8 years old) professionally. He majored in Computer Generated Animation and Visual Effects in college (where he won Best Animation for the entire CSU system a Rosebud Award). His music and sound design have been the soundtrack on several major productions; he has also served as a visual effects supervisor on feature films and was the supervising editor and animator for award-winning science visualizations. He has been building drones since the days when sensors and components had to be torn out of cell phones and game controllers. Ty is also a mentor, having taught many interns his skills, and speaks regularly at venues including Interdrone. He also serves on the advisory board for the Society of Aerial Cinematographers and for Genarts (now Boris) Sapphire.
Read more about Ty Audronis

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Running the numbers


We're not going to bore you with all of the calculations involved in computing your potential flight times. Instead, there's an extremely handy online calculator for helping you with your multicopter designs at https://www.ecalc.ch/xcoptercalc.php.

The results we get with this configuration are shown in the following screenshot:

I know the font is really small to read. The bottom line? We get about 5.5 minutes of flight time. If we were going into a production prototype, we'd spend a ton of time (and probably a lot more money) tweaking our parts until we reach just the right balance of flight time and payload. But this is certainly not a production prototype. Not with the camera we'd want to eventually carry, and nowhere near the size we'd eventually want to go for. For a simple proof of concept, we can deal with 5-minute flights. If we really want, we can bump that up to just over 7 minutes with a 5,000 mAh battery. But that may overload our motors if we ever go full throttle...

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Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1
Published in: Dec 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781786469168

Author (1)

author image
Ty Audronis

Ty Audronis has been called a "technology-age renaissance man." Hes a professional drone pilot, post-production specialist in the entertainment and media industries, a highly experienced interactive game developer, and an accomplished digital artist. Hes worked for companies ranging from frog Design to California Academy of Sciences in roles where hes worn many hats. Tys been programming software and games since 1981 (when he was 8 years old) professionally. He majored in Computer Generated Animation and Visual Effects in college (where he won Best Animation for the entire CSU system a Rosebud Award). His music and sound design have been the soundtrack on several major productions; he has also served as a visual effects supervisor on feature films and was the supervising editor and animator for award-winning science visualizations. He has been building drones since the days when sensors and components had to be torn out of cell phones and game controllers. Ty is also a mentor, having taught many interns his skills, and speaks regularly at venues including Interdrone. He also serves on the advisory board for the Society of Aerial Cinematographers and for Genarts (now Boris) Sapphire.
Read more about Ty Audronis