Is possible to control a Quad Toy by VRBRAIN ....... ?!? First Test of VR Pico Drone

[Roberto Navoni]

 

In the last months on the market appear a lot of low cost micro quad , they are very nice toys i like a lot play with it . But the main problem is that the standard electronic is not hackable and i cannot use my radio for control the quad. So i decide to evaluate if was possible interface a quad toy frame with my VRBRAIN.

• The main tets that i doing was the payload and discover that was possible to going in air with a payload of 100 gr. VRBrain in Naked configuration is only 21 gr
• The other problem was how i can manage the motors ? So i doing a bit of retro eng and discover the electronic need to my vrbrain for control the dc motors.
• After solve the electronic problem i start to check the patch to firmware and found how can change the pwm parameter for control the dc motors.
• Other problem was the battery , normally the quad toys use a 1s battery but the standard input voltage is 5volt. So i check the schematics of vrbrain and found a 3volt input , put on the 1s battery a small 3.3volt stabilizer and put the output on the gps output 3.3v .
• After last patch i thought that i'm ready for first fly , but last things  was the radio ... fortunately my Jeti receiver work also at 3.3volt  so it work , i have only a signal on my radio about low level voltage ... :(

The final result was this : I'm happy to present VR Pico Drones , basically it use standard arducopter32 2.9 on my VRBRAIN and support all standard functionality available in arducopter , stable , acro , loiter , rtl and auto navigation . So this is smallest Arducopter drone available on the planet :) This is only first prototype the wheight is 110 gr. My idea is to doing some optimization on board and have a 85 gr drone capable of 10 minutes of funny fly.

After some days of hard work this is my first fly test . I'm very happy of this first results :) The main target of this development is to use VRBRAIN for learning to fly during winter days in indoor. I play a lot with simulator but fly with a real copter is better.

[Kabir]

How did you get it to control the DC motors?