The Blade CX II attacks

So decided to bring up the TCM8240 on the latest board. Decided to use the same board for Marcy 2 & the Blade CX II. It's a lot of work to lay out a new board for each aircraft. They would both use the magnetometer & possibly camera.

Got it spitting out JPEG images at theoretically 1280x960. There is hope it can compress 640x480 in addition to the full 1280x1024. The mane issues with the TCM8240 are:

The pins are ridiculously close together, since it was obviously a surplus item intended for another product. If anything bridges, you need to desolder it & try again.

Pulse reset after power up.

PLL must be enabled for JPEG to work. Set register 0x3 to 0xc1.

Enable the data output & JPEG compression by setting register 0x4 to 0x40.

Data automatically starts streaming from the pins.

The day was spent remembering to call DCMI_CaptureCmd(ENABLE); to begin capturing on the STM32F407.

Thought this camera streaming wirelessly would make a good demo during an interview. Helas, another interview never happened, as someone else with just the right buzzword came along.

Then came the Blade CX II. Passed up any newer quad or flybarless copter in favor of this, because it was believed to be the most passively stable, it had the smallest size for its payload, & coaxials used to dominate academic research before quads.

For all the hype about coaxials being super stable, fuggedaboudit. It was extremely unstable & hands on to stay in position. To be sure, the tail undoubtedly stabilized the yaw & balanced it more, but there's no way that level of sensitivity is always going to be satisfied.

Marcy 1 is extremely stable. She can lift off & hover with no cyclic input. That kind of stability is way beyond anything commercially available.

The good news about the blade is the radio & flight computer were separate boards, making radio replacement easy. The payload should be plenty to handle the new flight computer.