Full autopilot Minimal autopilot Photos Videos Source code News Harass

Here you'll find all the source code and many notes used in Vicacopter, still the only English language source code for a fully functional helicopter autopilot that you can download without paying for.

You need to be an expert in PIC assembly, electronics, & the VicaCopter source code to actually get it to work, but this is actual source code flying our autonomous VTOL aircraft, not an incomplete stage which can't hover. If you ever succeeded in downloading the source code & building your own VicaCopter, you still probably wouldn't know half of what she can do. There is no support or warranty.

Vicacopter uses a ground computer for flight control. An airborne microcontroller handles rate damping, PWM, & sensor capturing. The ground computer handles navigation & provides a simple instrument panel. Because you need a radio modem & ground station either way, it's the cheapest way to fly.

Airframe #1 was a Corona 120. That flew for 1 year & is no longer manufactured, so it was replaced by a flybarless T-Rex 450. That flew for 1 year & got too expensive. Then came a quad rotor, but it was tricky to balance the yaw force, the counter rotating propellers were expensive, & motor shafts always bent. The latest airframe is a tri rotor & it is the cheapest & easiest route into the air of all. The servo has never gotten damaged & it has 1 less power system to break.

VicaCopter supports 2 configurations:
3 gyros & a sonar transducer for the minimal autopilot.
6 DOF IMU, magnetometer, barometer, GPS for the full autopilot

Some things VicaCopter can do:

Can fly with under $100 of parts, not including the airframe.
Automated landing & takeoff
Sonar position sensing for indoor flight
GPS position sensing for outdoor flight
Ground station instrument panel
Untethered communication from pilot to ground station
Fully autonomous missions written in picoC scripting language
Manual altitude & position changes from stick commands
Curved or linear paths
Turning towards a point
Camera trigger

Past airframes:

(C) 2009 Flat broke, low paid programmers