At long last I have the film rig pretty much complete. I’m awaiting fairer skies and one final part from Mouser before calling the project complete. I’ll be adding a removable shutter servo for the smaller digital camera I have, but I have an electric release for the film camera.

I have the code cleaned up to a point that I can share it. There’s schematics and board layouts in Eagle, too. I think my controllers are pretty special purpose to my particular ideas of how to do KAP. However, the code and concepts could be generally applied to anyone developing for these sorts of things. I would like to thank Tom Benedict for endless help, and the endlessly useful Orangutan Lib

N.b., that this code is not complete to the point that someone not already well versed in programming for AVRs could figure this out.

UPDATE: This code now works!  Timeout failover to autokap is turned off, but the autokap switch works.

Baud rate has been upped to 115200 from 9600 to fix an overflow problem.

And without further ado:

• Kiteside controller code
• Kiteside controller board
• Landside controller code
• Landside controller board
• Bill of Materials

You’ll need some more parts (like wire, solder, programming cable, etc.), but that’s the hardware. Feel free to drop me a line if you have questions.

Following are code snippets and commentary from my programming efforts. Most of the heavy lifting is the very handy orangutan-lib for the atmel atmega168, which you can download here. And much thanks to Tom Benedict, another KAPper, for all his help with this stuff.

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The controller is based on a simple serial control protocol.  There are four switches and a potentiometer on the landside controller, the state of each needs to be communicated to the kiteside controller.  Rather than use binary commands that I would likely not remember, I put together a very simple ASCII protocol.

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I’m putting together a KAP-oriented map of the Alameda NAS. I can’t link to it directly, since it violates the TOS of the map sources, but if you are a KAPper and are interested, drop me a line and I’ll send it to you.

(Above: Red line indicates power lines, blue line indicates fencing, blue area indicates off limits area)

I’ve decided to do some pretty significant upgrades to my rig before the new year. Now I’m in the lead-time doldrums. Here’s the list:

• Film & Batteries for the film camera: arrives monday here!
  
• Lightweight lens for the film camera: arrives tuesday. here!
  
• Custom boards for the controllers: ETA 3 weeks. 1 day!
• XBee Series 2 Coordinator: ETA 2 weeks. here!
• Misc. Electronic components: tbd (need to survey what I have)
• Re-assemble the camera I took the above shot with: tbd.

The goal is to have a film/digital convertible rig running by Jan 1. I should have a roughly 200m range on the controller, and it’ll be about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

In about three weeks, I’ll have my shiny new controller boards via Batch PCB. The controllers are based on the Atmel AVR series microcontrollers, all through hole parts, and the Xbee Series 2 Zigbee modules.

Woohoo.

Beautifully smooth winds out of the northwest let me get way offshore. It also made it quite easy to get over the Port of Oakland:

Seems like this camera does okay:

I did have one problem– the camera was focussing on the closest subject, which led to some odd focusses (particularly when it decided to focus on the line) — I did find the mode that’ll focus from 16ft to infinity. It remembers this mode between power-on and power-off (actually, the mode wheel is really nice, and will select between that various modes pretty smartly)

Hey, some more stuff out on the Alameda NAS, click for more:

And trying out a new style… let me know if you like it.