First Micro MWC Build

I have some photos of the first build with the Micro MWC flight control board.

It's a pretty simple build.  I am using a Picnic Frames' "Efficiency Platform" poly-carbonate frame with 4 generic 8x20mm motors.

The quad is flying pretty well now, since I started tweaking it a few days ago.  I loaded a version of MultiWii 2.3 that was hosted by the Micro Motor Warehouse here.  I am using the MultiWiiConf application to do the PID tweaking.

I will post my "final" settings when I am done playing around with them.

The Micro MWC MultiWii Flight Controller / Receiver Board

I have some quite time now, so I thought I would post some information.

I have been constructing a new quadcopter, trying to use the Micro MWC flight control board I received for my birthday.  Here is a picture of it (enlarged)...

The actual board is not much bigger than a standard SD card.  You can see where the motor connections are at the bottom.  This board has a built-in DSM2 receiver and 4 ESCs for the four motors of my quadcopter.  This FC board is strictly meant to drive brushed motors.

The most interesting part of the board, to me, is that it is a MultiWii flight controller that uses an Atmel AVR chip to run the flight control software.  I have always been interested in MultiWii because 

1. It allows you to tweak the flight performance of the quad in all sorts of ways
2. It's actually implemented as an Arduino sketch
3. It has this cool configuration utility

The first step I am going to take is solder some motor connectors to the board.  I have these micro JST (1.25mm) connectors that I ordered from AliExpress. My hope is that I have polarized my current motor connector to match the orientation that I am going to solder to the board.  I'll post more about this with some photos later.

Finally, I will also have to solder a power adapter to the board.

Another Twisty Turn

Yes, it has been a while.  And I have been busy.  I guess I just have not had the time to document my efforts.

That should change.  I really need to keep a record of my endeavors, at least for my own amusement.

So let's begin.

I have been working pretty heavily on a cross-platform application called the Model File Manager.  Simply put, it is a simple utility to manage the model files of a DeviationTX RC transmitter. Here are a couple of screenshots of the app...

It's not a terribly complicated application... more of a glorified file-manager for the storage files of a DeviationTX transmitter plugged in via a USB cable.  To the PC, the transmitter looks like a little flash drive that you can view and move files to and from.

Anyway, I wrote the app originally in Visual Studio with C# as the language.  While this was fine for some, others kept asking for a cross-platform version.  So I looked closer at the Mono project and specifically MonoDevelop... the IDE of choice for Mono.  I can honestly say that in hind-sight I should have looked at Mono earlier.  They have done a great job of building a highly usable IDE, which is a tall task.  I'm a professional Visual Studio user, so I am exposed to some of the best tools available... but at some point features just become bells and whistles.  It's like C#.  Sometimes language features boil down to just syntactic sugar.  But I digress.

MonoDevelop turned out to be a very capable IDE for building the application.  But there is no free lunch and I still had to learn GTK or GTK# the .NET binding for GTK.  This is where most of my learning turned out to be.  Translating WinForm knowledge into a workable GTK interface was tough.  There are a lot of conceptual differences between the two.

• GTK is actually more modern in its approach to layout of UIs.  What I mean by modern is that it takes flexible display sizes into account.  Right from the get-go you have to think about laying out your UI with flexible containers that shrink and grow as the window is re-sized.  Very much like the way Android and WPF approach UI design.
  
  WinForms is solidly in the "Fixed" realm, with the default layout building done with a fixed, absolute positioning of controls and elements.
• ListBoxes, ComboBoxes, etc... use the MVC pattern in GTK and that is taking some getting used to.  It will be a while before I can fully utilize the versatility of this approach.
• GTK uses barely any formatting properties... instead relying on the Window Manager to dictate the look of the controls.  Any formatting available though is done through a small style language called Pango.  An interesting approach to look and feel options.

Anyway, I finish up this post with the actual source files.  You will have to look at the readme.txt to learn how to build the app.

http://www.deviationtx.com/forum/6-general-discussions/4494-model-file-utility-updated?start=40#36867