TriRot in "training wheels"

posted 23 Jan 2012 15:01 by David Taylor

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So now that the hardware is done, and I have a PID control loop coded in, it’s on to PID Tuning. Even the limited research that I have done to date suggests that this is going to be difficult. Not wanting to break parts of TriRot and purchase new rotors on every attempt I opted to building a kind of training ring. TriRot fits perfectly inside. I’ve already used it a couple of times without much success though. I did find a bug in my code today which (once fixed) improved things about 500%. At this stage I do think it really is down to just tuning the PID loop since everything else now actually works as expected. I’ll post another video as soon as things improve a bit. I am however really contemplating buying an Arduino Mini Pro board for this as I’ve reads lots of stuff on the net saying that .Net is just not the right environment to do real time processing in. I’ve even asked Clint Rutkas from Microsoft the question and had it basically confirmed, although I’m still trying to understand exactly why this is. Chris from Secret labs did send me a link via Clint showing a working .Net quad: http://forums.netduino.com/index.php?/topic/1439-quadcopter-early-flight/ As you can see it’s not quite stable. Is this due to the implementation or is the .net framework really just not capable of doing this? If ye, why not?