Podcast Notes Scott Shawcroft of Chickadee Tech is our guest on this weeks podcast. He is working on a modular flight control system called polystack. It has 13 different boards that can be stacked together. Similar to shields for the Arduino platform. See Figure 1. Scott is down here in Houston visiting MacroFab to see his production run being built and working on his test fixture worked correctly. See figure 2. Seattle Multi Rotors is the group Scott is a part of. The software stack is based of off Beta Flight which is a fork of Clean Flight which is a fork of BaseFlight. The very first flight controllers where based of the Wii Nunchuck. Scott uses custom pin mappings and uses a larger ST MCU which required another fork. Scott got into Quadcoptors after watching the video Crash Session!!! His first quad was a from Flite Test. The Tiny Whoop is a small FPV quad that is easy to build. Chickadee Tech is Scott's first step into the hardware world. His first build was a lap timer using the radio strength signal. Scott self taught himself KiCad. AutoDesk purchased CadSoft from Farnell. Autodesk EAGLE - The perfect tool to designing stuff for PIC16MEGA32u4. The FR4 Machine Shield we mentioned in a previous podcast has a kickstarter now. It is a Arduino “shield” CNC machine. It comes on a 18” x 22” PCB panel. Motor controllers are called “Swap Drives”. Driver chips are on PCB cards that go into edge connectors. The FAA released new rules for operating rules for unmanned aircraft (Quads). Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro theme!
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