[Paparazzi-devel] New 10DOF IMU available

[maq]

Hi,

I have already met many of you on the last EMAV and IMAV competitions,  
though it's the first time to use the mailing list. I'm leading the  
PIXHAWK team at ETH Zurich and after two years of development we  
reached a state where we would like to share our system with the  
community. I would like to thank the whole Paparazzi community, since  
our first prototype was using PPZ hardware as well.

We have developed our custom IMU from scratch (3D ACC, 3D Gyros, 3D  
Mag, barometric pressure, temperature) using the popular LPC2148, and  
we rearranged our initially incompatible LPC2148 pinout from rev. 1.0  
of the IMU (EMAV 2009) to rev 2.5 (IMAV 2010) to match the TWOG  
pinout. We wanted to allow users to transition between hardware  
designs if they want to.

Our IMU software codebase is not Paparazzi compatible (no code- 
autogeneration) nor is the QGroundControl[1] operator control unit  
application, but due to the similar pinout I think  pxIMU might be  
usable with PPZ software on it. Please let me acknowledge that we're  
using the PPZ bootloader and the GCC-package on it, and its a really  
great setup for flashing.

http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/electronics/imu

Because it's quite hard for unexperienced users to assemble the  
hardware, we're offering our IMU in a non-commercial batch production,  
but you have to register within the week. This means that you just pay  
the electronics company and handling, but we don't make money on it  
(and the order is handled by a student, not PIXHAWK or ETH directly).

http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/buy-hardware/

You can also get our super-fast Core 2 Duo onboard processing board,  
which was demonstrated in autonomous indoor flight at IMAV 2010.

We have also set up a community webpage to ease the collaboration  
between PIXHAWK users, and a project wiki with documentation and  
tutorials:

http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/activity/
http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/wiki/imu_toolchain/start

I hope for good collaboration between the communities and thanks again  
for starting open-source in this field many years ago. See you at the  
next competition!

Cheers,
Lorenz

[1] http://qgroundcontrol.org/screenshots
     http://qgroundcontrol.org/videos