Richard J. Prinz

I was very pleased to give a presentation about the AMP Testbed Project at this years ESA ARTES Final Presentation Days on March, 8th 2017 at ESAs technical center ESTEC Newton conference room.

 
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During the last few blog posts about hacking Walkera quadcopter receivers I sought an easy way of programming them. Currently the easiest way of programming a microcontroller is by using the Arduino IDE. In this post I describe the integration of Walkera RC receiver board into the Arduino IDE.

This will also be the last post of this series as I have achieved (almost) all goals. Future ideas meight be to port the MultiWii firmware to Walkera boards or to use the boards for something completely different. In 2016 we had the idea to use a QR-Ladybird RX2634H board as a secure fitness tracker and made a submission to austrian support program NetIdee. See a short video about it on youtube (in german). Unfortunately it was rejected.

 
 
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Finally after about two years of development the AMP (Advanced Mobility Protocolls) testbed developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) was delivered to its European Space Research and Technology Center (ESTEC) in Noordwijk, Netherlands.

AMP consists of a virtualization host, cisco switches, a JAR Network Emulator and some physical hosts and allows the simulation of various IPv6 mobility protocolls in a satellite context like PMIP, NEMO and MPTCP. It is completely self contained, remote controllable and can simulate even complex network layouts.

It was a pleasure to work on this project!

This post describes an easy and cheap way of adding a USB serial port to a Walkera RX2634H (QR Ladybird) or RX2635H (Hoten-X) RC quadcopter receiver board. This makes it very easy to update these controllers with new software (especially when using UP42)

The used USB to serial board uses a CP2102 from Silicon Labs. Such boards are cheap and easy available on platforms like ebay or amazon. The board is also very light (~2 gramms) so that it can be permanently installed on the receiver without impairing flight performance.

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Some time ago I wrote a blog post about exporting FitBit fitness data into a Sqlite3 database or exporting it as a CSV file for further processing. This was done using a simple Node.js javascript script called “fitbit_dumper”. The original dumper used OAuth version 1 to access the FitBit API.

Since 2016 the FitBit API is only accessible using OAuth2. So this post describes the differences to the original post.
 
 
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