About three months ago I finished a university project that I had started long time ago but was interrupted by my stay abroad in Madrid. The project I’m talking about is an interdisciplinary project in computer science and aeronautics with the goal to design a hardware controller meant to distribute data among the various subsystems of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV).

During the project a controller circuit and board have been designed that provide several interfaces such as CAN bus, RS485 and RS232 to allow for the connection of a existing inertial measurement unit (IMU), a GPS system, two servo interfaces to control the UAV’s control surfaces and two modems for up- and downlink to communicate with a ground station. Furthermore it also account for a planned extension of the UAV’s electronics by a flight control processor.

The overall design was mainly targeted at and based on Atmel microcontrollers. Development itself was done using Eagle, WinAVR, Atmel AVR Studio, Microsoft Visual Studio, PonyProg and several other small tools. Further details on the project can be found in the following (official) documents:

• Project Documentation
  [Download PDF] [View Online]
• Presentation Slides
  [Download PDF] [View Online]

Unfortunately, this is the only project at university that I did actually do in German, i.e. both documents linked above are in German language and since I’m currently not too blessed with spare time, an English translation won’t follow too soon.

Finally, below you can find two video sequences showing the final result, i.e. the finished data distribution controller in a 3D rendering generated by Eagle3D, a tool which I must say, does an absolutely amazing job. Watch and enjoy!