Im wondering what the starting point and materials involved in making a gps steered parachute. I dont need an ‘autopilot’ because i dont want to alter my decent path to hit the target. im simply ( ) attempting to fly to the preprogrammed point and then circle there until impact. single servo. accuracy is semi important. just want it in the general area. +/- 100 feet maybe?
summary:
drop a parachute, have it steer to waypoint, circle there
Here is a shot of one.
If you place a ssc-32 (to operate the servos), gps, camera, and a bluesmirf modem on board you could easily control it to fly via gps and program it through your laptop. Once you got it going you could load the software on a cell phone and mount the cell phone on board and operate it (via bluetooth) for complete autonomous operation. The cell could even send back the coordinates to a website so you could monitor the progress.
You could scale this setup back by dropping the motor and just using the servos to steer if you wanted to drop it from a plane.
I have a simple Visual Basic program for running servos with a slider using a SSC32. If you know someone that has worked with Visual Basic they could help you use it. You could use that software to test your servos to make sure your servo setup can steer your parachute.
Once I get my software working with the GPS I’ll post it here otherrobots.com
Probably won’t be until end of summer. Presently I’m using the GPS service code from Microsoft Robotics and modifying it to work with the SSC32. msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb483029.aspx
) attempting to fly to the preprogrammed point and then circle there until impact. single servo. accuracy is semi important. just want it in the general area. +/- 100 feet maybe?
)