For this photo friday I chose some pictures I took over the summer while on a trip to California. My vaulting team and I drove out there for an international competition and afterwards we decided to make a little vacation out of it. We ended up going to the Santa Cruz Boardwalk and on our way back home we stopped by the Gand Canyon. These are some of my favorite shots from the trip, I hope you enjoy!
-Matt.
I'm a little late, but here's an introductory post to the quadcopter/drone project I'm working on with my dad. I was hoping to have a little more to show for this post but I'll work with what I've got. There are a couple overall goals for this project, the first, obviously, is to make an autonomous drone quadcopter that can fly from waypoint to waypoint point. This is the main goal of the current quadcopter now. It's acting as a test device for the autopilot software that we are currently developing. Once the autopilot software is built for the quadcopter we are going to redesign and build a couple of quadcopters each for different uses. The first one is a cinematography/photography quadcopter that will hopefully have the ability to carry heavier cameras and will have a gimbal system to allow a steady camera during movents or the ability to pan and tilt the camera independently of the quadcopter. The second quadcopter I want to build is a more aerodynamic quadcopter that could still have a GoPro attached to it, but would be a little more nimble than the full heavy duty video quadcopter.
The second goal we have for this project is to create a small drone aircraft capable of long distance autonomous flights. The basic idea for this right now is a large glider like airplane that would use solar panels incorporated in the wings to help power the motor. Doing some back of the envelope calculations there's potential for almost eight hours of flight time which is very encouraging.
Right now we are still in development of the Inertial Navigation Unit (INU) which basically keeps track of the position, velocity, roll, pitch, yaw and all the other values that dictate the motion and or position of the quadcopter. While this might seem like an easy thing to do it's really not. I don't want to get into the math part of the INU here, but I'll follow this post up with something about why the INU was hard to build and what we did to get around that. I should probably take a second here to say that for this project I don't do a lot of the actual programming. My role is more helping with some of the concepts and designing the frame and physical aspects of the quadcopter. So with that, here's a picture of the current quadcopter.
It's not very pretty but it's just a test device for now. So as of right now when you turn it on it kinda thinks it's upside down and jerking in every direction so we had to get that fixed. The last time I checked with my dad he had found the problem in the code and was working on getting it. However, once we get that fixed it's just a few more lines of code before the thing should be able to hover in one position. Hopefully we'll get that accomplished over the thanksgiving weekend. Next weekend we will hopefully get the INU all fixed and I'll take some video of the GUI and some motor tests because it's pretty cool when the motors start spinning.
Anyways. That's kinda what we have now and what we want to do. Keep checking back for updates about this as the posts will probably include cool videos which are always fun.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt.
So I said I was going to do it and I did it! (Yay) Photo Friday is here and I'm going to start off with a selection of photos I took while I was in portland. But first let me take a second to talk about how I'm going to format this. What I wanted to do was have a separate gallery so that all the pictures I uploaded would be in one place and then I could link the gallery to the blog and the most recent photos would then appear in the blog post. However that's not how things work on here (or at least I couldn't find a way to do that). Also, I hated the default gallery page on here so built my own called "Matt's Photos" under my tab in the navigation menu. SO, I'm going to upload all the photos there and then re-upload them here. More work for me, but I'm hopping I'll get the look I want. So with out further delay, here are some pictures. (Click on a picture to enlarge it)
I was going to say something about the photos, like where specifically they were taken or what I liked about it, but I thought that would detract from the purpose of this post. In the future these post should be just mainly photos with very limited text. I hope you enjoy the pictures and keep checking back, we've got lots of cool things in the works.
Thanks for stopping by
-Matt.
It's been exactly two weeks since my first post which is way more time than I intended. But it doesn't really seems like I've done a lot in-between now and two weeks ago, at least not a lot of interesting stuff. Basically school kinda took over. But now things should be settling down until finals roll around so I thought I'd take a minute to do a post about some (interesting) day to day stuff I've done at school.
Tuesday, I woke up at 2 in the morning while most college people were just about to think about going to sleep. Why? Because I was going to go see a rocket launch, like a big rocket. The design team I'm on at school is doing research into Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in space. I'll try not to make this too boring but basically SHM is, as its name suggests, monitoring how sound or healthy a structure is by looking at the stresses and strains in the members of the structure (stresses are the forces and loads the members are carrying and strain is the amount of deformation the members take under the stresses they carry). So basically SHM is a way to tell if your building has a crack in it. What we want to know is weather the same methods of SHM used on earth will work in space, or if the space environment would cause some adverse side effects on the equipment. So the team before us designed and built a payload to go fly in a rocket to test some stuff. Then, on tuesday, I woke up at 2 in the morning to go see the rocket launch the payload into space.
Overall it was not the most exciting thing in the world. We got to the launch site about 2 hours early, then the flight was delayed about an hour. The actuall rocket launch was pretty cool, but it was only about a minute. Then it took them about 2 hours to recover it and then another hour or so for us to get our payload out of the rocket. So the day was pretty much spent waiting around. However we did get a chance to take a tour of Spaceport America which made the day a little better. Spaceport America is the new spaceport out side of Las Cruces NM where Virgin Galactic, and other companies in the future, will base their operations for commercial space flight. So those commercials with Richard Branson floating in a space shuttle in space, the space shuttle (or space vehicle) would take off and land at Spaceport America. I think SpaceX also has some kind of launch pad or something at the Spaceport and when Lady Gaga does her concert in space she'll take off from there. Anyways, right now they have one terminal/hanger building, which is pretty cool, and one freaking huge runway. Virgin Galactic was doing something inside the terminal so we couldn't go inside but we were able do drive around on the runway and holy crap the thing was huge. The building was really unique as well. It had basically no right angles (I would not have wanted to be the engineer that had to design that) and then a huge wall of glass looking out on the runway. It's unique because it's not only a terminal for all the passengers paying a quarter of a million dollars (literally, look it up) to go to space, but it also houses the planes and shuttles that take them there. If you search "spaceport america" in google images you'll probably get a good idea (I didn't want to deal with getting an image in here, especially one I don't own). So despite being sleep deprived, hungry and annoyed with all the waiting, I can now say that I've walked on the runway at Spaceport America, which is pretty cool.
I figure I'll take a minute at the end of this post to let you know what my plans are for this blog. I'd like to start sharing some photos with you guys so I think every friday I'm going to find a photo I like and share it with you (I also need to figure out how the album thing works on this website). So I'll try and start that this friday. Maybe I'll call it Photo Phriday. . . or Foto Friday. . . none of those really sound good. Anyways, I also want to get some posts on here about the quadcopter so hopefully I'll have something on monday or tuesday with videos and pictures and lots of math stuff. So yeah, keep checking back here because I'll be posting more often with cool stuff and pictures and videos.
Thanks for reading.
-Matt.
So. . .most of the introductory stuff that I might put in a first blog post is already over on the info page. All my interests and what I do and what I'm going to blog about are all over there. With that out of the way, let's dive in.
I figured I'd start off with the development progress I've made towards the new game we are working on. If you don't know, the game is basically going to be a tower defense game with two kinds of game play. The player will be able to build towers with upgrade paths and all the usual tower defense game stuff, but in addition to that, you'll be able to change to the point of view of a tower and shoot the on coming enemies one at a time, man to man, sort of like a 1st person shooter tower defense game. The player takes control of a tower by holding the device in a portrait orientation and when they do, they are able to scan the horizon by sweeping the device from left to right, almost like taking a panoramic picture. Except instead of taking a picture you're looking for enemies to kill.
My job was to basically do that. Access the gyro readings from the phone and make them move the background. At first I thought this was going to be a kind of daunting task because the gyro values would have to be integrated to get the position and nobody likes integration. But upon further research I found that in the CoreMotion framework there is already attitude values, yay! What that means is that Apple has already done the hard part for you and integrated the three gyros to give you a position vector in three space defined by roll, pitch, and yaw values in radians. For the purposes of sweeping the background all I was interested in were the yaw values. So with a little (a lot) of help from stack overflow I built a gyro object which would give the yaw values at a variable time interval. Then, after realizing that the values were pretty noisy I put in a low pass filter to help smooth out the readings. Now it was time to go back to Cocos2D.
The last part of this was pretty simple. I had an angle value of how far off center I was. So then I assumed that the background was going to sweep a total of say 90 degrees. Then, knowing the total horizontal pixels in the background image I could divide by 90 and get a pixel per degree scalar. Then I just had to multiply by the angle given by the gyro and poof, I had a number of pixels to move my image to. Then there was some fiddling with coordinate systems and switching some signs but in the end I got it all working pretty well.
There are some minor issues that may need to get worked out later on down the road but for now I'm happy with what I've got. The next step now is to paste the enemies and the background in one layer so that when you sweep the device you not only change the background position but also the enemies lateral position so that it's in the view of the screen. I want to talk to Austin about how that's going to happen since it has a large impact on how the rest of the game is going to be coded.
So yeah. That's my first blog post. Longer than I was expecting and a lot of words. I'll try to keep things more interesting with pictures and videos and stuff. I hope this gave you and idea of the game we're working on and what kind of progress we've made so far. My next post will probably be about the quadcopter. That one will probably be kind of mathy as well, but I'll try and add a video to keep it interesting.
Thanks for reading!
-Matt.
