It has recently been brought to my attention that the Millswood Failsafe board does not correctly decode RC channel 5 from high-rate PWM outputs, such as from recent Futaba receivers. I have updated the firmware to support high-rate PWM, but unless you are actually experiencing problems switching between RC and Autopilot control, or are using a receiver that is known to output high-rate PWM, there is no need to upgrade (and risk upsetting a tested, working system).

The update (v1.26) is here

And I would like to wish all OBC teams all the best for the competition. I hope lots of teams get the green light to drop a package to Joe, and that the organisers are forced to use their measuring tape repeatedly to determine the winner!

Cheers,
Andrew.

Best of luck to all involved in this years challenge! I'm looking forward to meeting the teams and restocking my supply of Kingaroy peanuts.

Best of luck indeed, I am sure Joe is going to be found many times over!

Well done to all the competing 2012 OBC teams, looks like the Kingaroy triangle has won again!

It's been a fantastic few days here in Kingaroy, and CanberraUAV would like to thank all the organisers and sponsors for putting on such a great event!
We really enjoyed meeting all the other teams, and we look forward to seeing you all here again at the next competition.
Over the next few weeks we will write up some detailed reports on what worked and what didn't work in our OBC effort. We'll post links as we get that done.
Thank you all, and good luck preparing for next time!
Cheers, Tridge

Don't hate me for this but from a spectators point of view I think the uav competition is dyeing a slow death ,spectator numbers were down no shade cover over seating area no big screen.
School teams seem not to be as enthusiastic or organized as previous years.
I enjoy the uav comp but I think it needs to be expanded or promoted more to get more involved, maybe some other class events such as ground based search rovers which could involve state schools or may be different tasks in the search and rescue such as automated flight to the search area and back with automated landing. Not as difficult as finding joe but could be incorporated into the comp as well as finding joe just to get more involved.
Well done to all the teams and organizes involved I just don't what to see this competition die out.

We looked carefully at our logs last night and worked out a possible location for the bottle that dropped off our plane. We had a microswitch on the plane to detect the release, and we were logging the switch status.
Today we went out into the search area where we thought the bottle might be and we found it! A nice way to end our stay in Kingaroy.

We've also discussed within our team about making all of the images we took from our plane of the search area available to other teams to help them prepare for next time. It is something around 40GByte of images, so we thought that if anyone wants it they can post us a SD card and we'll send it back full. Alternatively, if someone has enough space/bandwidth to host it then let us know!

The images will be 1280x960 raw bayer grids (easily convertable to png/jpg with a program we can supply) and will come with telemetry logs for geo-referencing.

Cheers, Tridge

Where did you find it tridge? Up near Joe or over near the orchard, or did it hit that guy in the tractor that was plowing his field?!!

Originally Posted by anthonyATteamMUROC

Where did you find it tridge? Up near Joe or over near the orchard, or did it hit that guy in the tractor that was plowing his field?!!

It was at -26.6272653 151.8470895 in an open field. We'd estimated the location as being at -26.6272653 151.8470895 (which is where the microswitch triggered). The 145m difference was probably the ballistic trajectory of the bottle.

We chatted to a couple of the farmers - very friendly locals!

Cheers, Tridge

Where can I send the SD card to get those pics and logs thanks Tridge.
regards
Anthony

Originally Posted by erasertech

Where can I send the SD card to get those pics and logs thanks Tridge.
regards
Anthony

I know I've already answered you privately, but I might as well give the address here for anyone else who wants it.
To get the images, send an SD card that can hold at least 40GByte (or multiple cards) to:
Andrew Tridgell
26 Carstensz st
Griffith ACT
2603 Australia

I'll post samples of the images (and the all important Joe shots!) on my website when I get home, along with the telemetry logs. I just don't have the bandwidth on my home ADSL link to host the full set if more than a few people download them.

Cheers, Tridge

For those of you who aren't already following our mailing list, I thought I'd post some links to the source code of all of the systems we ran on the plane and on the ground stations in the competition.

The code is available at:
ArduPlane: https://code.google.com/r/tridge60-apm-wip (look in the OBC branch)
MAVProxy: http://github.com/tridge/MAVProxy (ground station main code)
mavlink: https://github.com/tridge/mavlink (MAVLink comms protocol)
cuav: http://github.com/tridge/cuav (imaging and other misc stuff)
SiK: http://github.com/tridge/SiK (the radio firmware for RFD900)

There are some startup scripts and other minor pieces not in there, but I'll post those later when I do the full write up. Meanwhile, if you want to see how something works you can have a poke around. We'd like to apologise in advance for the lack of documentation! Michael has been working on cleaning up the code a bit (especially the horrible imaging code!) but we were too worried about bugs to incorporate the cleanups in the competion aircraft without testing. Most of our custom code is in python, mostly as MAVProxy modules.

If you use the code and enhance it then please do push your changes to a public git repo for everyone to see.

Also, if you want to ask questions about the code, please just ask publicly on this forum. That will save time answering people individually.

I've also put some telemetry logs and our autopilot parameters here:

http://uav.tridgell.net/OBC-2012/

Cheers, Tridge

More updates from Team OpenUAS as soon as we are home in the Netherlands again and got our footage sorted. Here already a picture from our our airframe looking for Joe I've got extracted from some video footage.

Here a resized version of Team OpenUAS ground footage of mission area during OBC2012 search phase. Try to spot Joe (Hint: we could not spot Joe either here

The horizon view straight from the airframe of Team OpenUAS during the UAV Outback Challenge mission to find Outback Joe... sadly he was not rescued by us this time.