Embedded Development

If you're with me so far, in our Snapdragon Flight VR build, you might have noticed that the connectors that come with the motors do not match the connectors that come with the Snapdragon ESC. This means we need to replace the connectors so electrons can flow and power the motors. Remembering that the whole point of this is to get electrons to flow will make the concept easier. Copper is a conductive material, that's what wires are made up of. Solder is a metal material that is highly conductive with a low melting point and solidifies fast. So the idea is we want to use the molten solder to join the wires to the new connector. I personally favor damaging a cheap motor to damaging an expensive ESC, so I opt for doing the work on the motor connections themselves and highly recommend this path. While the minimum you'll need is 4 connectors, I am really good at making mistakes, so I wound up getting 10. The first step, is to cur the old connector off. Grab a pair of w...

In order to have a VR Drone, we must start building a real physical Drone. Snapdragon Flight offers a great light weight powerful platform we can do a lot with. While most home built Drones are built with very custom specs; I felt it necessary to make this very approachable by ensuring the Drone is built exactly as the specs outline. Our's looks slightly different, but hey Drone time! Let's start with the parts the Drone needs: Allen Wrench Hex Key Set Dynamite 5 pc Metric Nut Driver Assortment Generic M2.5 Nylon Hex M-F Spacer/Screw/Nut Assorted Kit Loctite Heavy Duty Threadlocker 2x clock wise motors 2x counter clock wise motors ac converter for battery charger battery charger Battery ESC (to control the 4 props) Frame Kit gps antenna 4 x DF3-3P-2DSA connector Wifi antenna Grey props: x2 Red props: x2 Before jumping straight into working with the hardware, a small house keeping task must be preformed. There's a small problem, If you have big ...

In order to connect to a USB Serial connection as is the case in connecting to Snapdragon Flight , there's slightly different ways for each host operating system. I broke this up to a separate blog post to provide easy reference for any other project. I'd note that these instructions work equally well on Intel's Edison boards which also require USB Serial connections. If you're trying to connect from windows, here's some steps for you: Run putty Now configure Putty as follows: Click Serial under Connection Type In the Serial line field, enter the COM# for your board, such as COM12. NB: If you did not identify your COM# when setting up your board, navigate to the Device Manager and check for an entry called USB Serial Port (not Intel Edison Virtual Com Port). The COM# is displayed next to the USB Serial Port entry, as highlighted below. Give the Speed field a baud rate that seems appropriate: 115200 Your configuration screen should look like this: C...