About the Softants Project
Welcome to the 'lets throw a computer on an RC
helicopter and ask it to take off and fly' project.
We are also know by our more official (an shorter) name:
'The Softants Project'.
"softants.org"
What is the "Softants Project"? What is the "softants.org" domain all about?
The Simple Answer
We want to take any helicopter; put a clear definition of logic (in hardware and software) and allow that logic control to accomplish any task required of it.
More Details
We are a very small group working towards getting an RC helicopter in the air and moving around in an UAV fashion.
So what background do we have and where are the real details of the project?
You want more details about the project? More information? We will do our best to supply as much as we can online while we are developing.
- Project Source Code - All the released project code we have produced. As part of the release schedule we might just release a partial set of research material of what we are planning to do next and incomplete code. These releases will be signified by the letter 'a' in the version.
- Project Hardware - Here are the circuit diagrams for all boards and connections for the project. All schematics are drawn with Eagle and are avilable online.
- Project Documents - Every scrape of words than we can bring into a document than describes this project. If you would like a non technical overview of what we are doing, this area of the site will show the high levels of the system and what is possible with this technology.
The Project
More Blurb....
The project is a 100% open source project. We don't do Windowz, just Linux and all the code released will be written in C and C++ and tested on Linux with the GNU C compiler. You should/might be able to get this project compiled in Windowz; we just haven't tried it :)
We differ from other projects of a similar nature in the fact that we are building a completely autonomous flying vehicle that doesn't need a powerful ground station to control it's activities. Our project is completely sustained within the flying airframe and doesn't rely on any extra processing from a ground station. All this functionality will be squeezed into a few Kilobytes of ram, whereas other projects require Megabytes of ram in a separate PC linked via radio on the ground.
Just to make our project even more difficult, we plan to use a full collective pitch helicopter. This means we have to control the full dynamics of the helicopter via electronics and software to achieve the simplest of tasks like hovering!
There are only two people in the company but we are both proficient helicopter pilots; ok, we can take off and do a couple of circuits - but even this level of RC helicopter skill takes a couple of years to learn! Using this knowledge and skill we believe that we can use our extensive knowledge in computer systems and programming to build a fully comprehensive helicopter UAV that will soon out smart our own flying abilities in a far shorter time than it would take us :)
The project is in it's infancy at the moment and we are working away day and night to get to the first stage of getting the RC helicopter to attain a stable hover.
Some of the hardware and software we are using, or have used recently:
- Atmel AVR Chips (ATmega8, ATmega168 and ATmega32, ATtiny45, At2313)
- Linux AVR-GCC cross compiler and Linker, we work with Gentoo Linux
- Development is all done via remote Linux boxes; you know, the Gentoo thing!
- Actual chip programming is done via a parallel port programmer on a P166Mhz laptop or a dragon USB Programmer with more upto date PC's/Laptops.
We are the Rutland Penguins; so named because we are very much Linux people and we live in the little county of Rutland in the UK. Futher details about the company are available on the Company Details page.
There are two people in the project at the moment: