A great flying quad-copter:
I’m having some trouble with the MTK GPS and the winter weather in St. Louis, but otherwise, this is the best flying copter I’ve ever had. It has a GPS/barometric pressure/sonar rangefinder driven autopilot that will be able to fly waypoints and come home on command. I’m working now on a tilt/pan video camera transmitted to the ground and commands on a bidirectional data link (XBEE). Highly recommended and available at: DIY Drones.
This is video from last September of my first Ardupilot test. To keep the first test simple, I modified the software configuration to fly a simple fixed heading of 45 degrees when I engage the autopilot from the R/C unit. This worked very well for a while until the last attempt, when something glitched in the software/GPS and commanded a dive into the ground into one of the few trees in the field. The end of the video shows several frames of video as the pieces were stripped off the airplane by the tree. All the electronics survived the crash and I’m rebuilding a new airframe to test in the Spring.