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The UAV Dev Board, originally designed and open sourced by Bill Premerlani, is an IMU-based development platform for building controllers for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. This site hosts the development of the MatrixPIlot UAV code that runs on this board, allowing it to stabilize an airplane, maintain altitude, and navigate to specific locations, or back to the launch site.
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You can now buy a UDB5mini board (a UDB5-compatible board with a smaller footprint than the original, designed by Ben Levitt) from Octopilot Electronics.
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The UAV Dev Board from Spark Fun has been retired. The UDB5 is an open source hardware design, and some members of the group are fabricating new boards using MacroFab.
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The AUAV3 Dev Board from Nick Arsov is no longer in production.
If you buy a UAV Dev Board, and are interested in hearing about upcoming changes, or want to participate in or influence future development, we strongly urge you to join the UAV Dev Board Discussion List.
There is a large amount of historical information about this project on the original community platform on the DIY Drones site.
MatrixPilot 5.0.2 Released - Fri 3, March, 2017 This was primarily a bug fix release. The on board barometer and magnetometer of the AUAV3 now work correctly when operating on the same I2C bus. Static Magnetometer offsets allow the HMC5883L to work correctly. More details on the status page. The code is available from here.
MatrixPilot 5.0 Released - Thu 27, October, 2016
The Helical Turns flight control is now used in Fly By Wire and Autonomous flight. We have migrated our code from Sourceforge to Github. Microchip's MPLAB-X IDE is now the standard IDE for developing the firmware. The legacy MPLAB IDE is no longer supported. More details are available the status page. A demonstration video is available at this location. The code is here .
The UDB5 (UAV Development Board version 5) comes populated with a dsPIC33FJ256 CPU, and the MPU-6000, a MEMS 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis accelerometer.
It is intended for the do-it-yourselfer. By itself, it can be used to develop a three axis IMU controller. With the addition of a GPS receiver, it can be used to develop a UAV controller for an RC car, plane, or boat. All firmware versions are compatible with the EM506, EM406 GPS. The new MatrixPilot firmware can also use the uBlox 5H GPS, and the MediaTek GPS, but the developers currently recommend using the EM506.
- Join the uavdevboard google group to follow the latest development
- Get set up to program your UAV Dev Board with the latest firmware (PDF)
- How to get your UAV Dev Board set up, installed, and connected to the rest of your hardware
- How to configure the firmware for your plane
- Troubleshooting problems with your UAV Dev Board
- Contribute to the project