COSMEcopter. Prototype P04

Almost a year and a half ago, COSMEcopter was presented in this blog. During all this time a few preliminary prototypes have been developed. Now we are currently working in prototype P04.

P04 is a substantial milestone in the project. It can be described with these three points:

• RQ01: "the thing" shall be able to elevate a few centimeters above the ground, 
• RQ02: it shall be able to stay stationary for a few seconds
• RQ03: it shall be able to land softly (that is: without crashing)

COSMEcopter attached to the "jamonero", ready to perform another batch of One Axis Integration Tests.

Well, only three short one-line-requisites shouldn´t be very hard to achieve, should they?

By now, Eugenio Alcalá is struggling with a series of one axis integration tests, where two motors are running in a coordinated fashion for the first time in the project.
This test is meant not only to validate the control algorithms, but also to answer an even more important question: Is the realtime performance of the combo "Raspberry-Pi-computer + Linux-Preemptive-RT-kernel-patch" good enough for this kind of tasks?



Félix Serna

COSME + Raspberry Pi + quadcopter = COSMEcopter

COSMEcopter is a spin-off project which mixes a few different but complementary disciplines, while assuring that everybody is having lots of fun!!


COSMEcopter is a project intended to collaboratively specify, design and build a  a slightly uncommon type of quadcopter.
Why uncommon?. Well, do not forget that our goal is not building a copter, but using it as a testbed for the COSME framework running on a small linux computer.

So, in our case, we are necessarily going to use these two products:

• COSME  as the middleware platform for the control software
• a raspberry pi as OBC (on-board computer) and communications hub (via wifi)

Keep listening. We`ll get you informed.

The first electronic components arrived a few weeks ago

A few Raspberry Pis, accelerometers, magnetometers, etc. are waiting...

A COSME demo client application shows up in a Raspberry Pi

After having installed OpenJDK, trying to execute an existing COSME client demo was the next logical step.
Fortunately, this java UI demo run smoothly but, as the X windowing is *still* not hardware accelerated, the impact on the CPU was pretty high. We look forward to see this topic solved in the near future. Then, the raspberry will be a good choice when an inexpensive UI terminal is needed (=> which is always ;-)

On the server side, a few experiments are still on the way... A non RT COSME implementation is expected to be tried in the near future.

Our first Raspberry-Pi finally arrived!!

It will be nice to have a COSME/ IEC 61499 device this cheap.
Let's see how capable it ends up being!

Another one in the planet.

Last May 17th, we could (at last) order a Raspberry Pi.
Hope to have a COSME prototype working on it soon some day...