clolson
Aug 27, 2005, 04:11 PM
Has anyone here had a chance to play with a MIDG II INS/GPS from Microbotics, Inc. (http://www.microboticsinc.com/midg.html)
The neat thing about the MIDG is that it gives you GPS position + gyro/accelerometer based attitude. It also includes a 3 axis magnetometer which I believe is used to error correct the heading (?) You can also fetch out the raw magnetometer readings if you want.
We borrowed one of these to test it out and this past Wednesday we flew it on our Sig Rascal 110. We connected it via a radio modem link to a laptop on the ground which let us monitor the flight and captured the binary data stream.
Today I whipped up a little program to load and parse the binary data and feed it into FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org)
It's pretty neat. Position comes in at about 5 hz, attitude comes at about 50hz. Our radio modem occasionally dropped or corrupted data, but drop outs are infrequent enough that you can get nice smooth animation.
Anyway for people that have a little bit of a budget who might want to roll their own autopilot, this seems like a pretty nifty unit. And for people that have one of these already, you can now feed the data into FlightGear to get a virtual replay of your flight.
Curt.
The neat thing about the MIDG is that it gives you GPS position + gyro/accelerometer based attitude. It also includes a 3 axis magnetometer which I believe is used to error correct the heading (?) You can also fetch out the raw magnetometer readings if you want.
We borrowed one of these to test it out and this past Wednesday we flew it on our Sig Rascal 110. We connected it via a radio modem link to a laptop on the ground which let us monitor the flight and captured the binary data stream.
Today I whipped up a little program to load and parse the binary data and feed it into FlightGear (http://www.flightgear.org)
It's pretty neat. Position comes in at about 5 hz, attitude comes at about 50hz. Our radio modem occasionally dropped or corrupted data, but drop outs are infrequent enough that you can get nice smooth animation.
Anyway for people that have a little bit of a budget who might want to roll their own autopilot, this seems like a pretty nifty unit. And for people that have one of these already, you can now feed the data into FlightGear to get a virtual replay of your flight.
Curt.