So I’m sure your average person would think I’m nuts, but I’m like a kid at Christmas when I open a box to find little electronic bits have arrived. Today it was a dual-axis gyro sensor from SparkFun. They sell all kinds of electronic gizmos, including this one, suggested to me by a guy at Overview Technologies. They built a 4-prop camera platform and stabilized it with off-the-shelf R/C gyros, which work, but they’re not ideally suited for this kind of thing. He said they were experimenting with this board from SparkFun, which has two gyros on it, and a bunch of pinouts to plug it directly into a PIC chip’s analog to digital converter.
It’s also really small.
They display it on the site next to a quarter, but it’s enlarged in the picture and I didn’t really register how small it was until I pulled it out of the package. It’s just shy of a 3/4″ square. The actual chip that’s doing all the work is about a ninth of that, but I’m not really comfortable with surface mount stuff, so the little board is perfect.
Tonight I wired up the gyro board and all the servo jacks on a small project board. I can display the gyro values on the LEDs, so it appears to work.
My motors, speed controls, and counter-rotating propellers should all be here monday (Tues at the latest) so I’m chomping at the bit to get started with the meat of the project.
Whee.