Just to make your brain water, we have a sneak peak at the final layout of the Killer IMU AHRS+NAV.

Yes!! The 6 layer or Bust goal has been reached!!

The power supply is looking pretty complex! Point of load really (as was one of the key points of our power supply design for the entire system) so should be pretty low noise and good upto 40 Volts too (work on both 12 and 24 V airplane systems)

The ram footprint was changed to BGA to make the routing easier, and it paid off. Net lengths were optimized, and signal analysis has been completed. Network resistors for series termination of the EBI bus were placed accordingly to minimize reflections and crosstalk. Timings analyzed accordingly. The GOSD chip went BGA as well.

Approximately 30 Chips and about 250 passives make for a cramped board with all the connectors we have and the complex power supply.

Shouldnt run hot either, the external voltage is dropping down nicely thanks to our switcher, then the linears are all LDO's and dont have too far to go. The heatup associated to the pure amperage will be rather minimal and we will give it plenty of space to breath too. Remember our enclosure acts as a heatsink.

Expect to be off to china with the 1st revision within a month...I want to go visit with the design, we'll see! I've been asking our china guys for a tour :-)

We are in the code and verification stage of our tilt compensated magnetometer solution for our Killer IMU AHRS+NAV!

This product can be used to supplement an IMU with data for low speeds when not on GPS and in dead reckoning situations.

The (offboard) GPS provides a heading reference for the 3 axis mag to use in self-calibration as a secondary heading reference when GPS coverage is not good or PDOP is not trusted.

It can also be used as a tilt compensated compass :-)

Applications:
-Raw 3 axis magnetic readings with true reset blanking circuit
-Tilt compensated heading with multiple G ranges
-Accelerometer data

Hardware:
-switching power supply-upto 40 Vin-low noise VREGs
-40 MIPS DSP MCU
-I2C or UART interface on Molex lockable connector
-3 axis Honeywell HMC1053 with true reset circuit
-3 axis accelerometer in multiple G ranges
-Extra pins and 12 bit ADC lines

As always, our firmware source code is provided for further development, and it includes advanced full floating point routines to make this module ready from the start for your application with a full range of commands.

Analog Devices has some great PLL's!!

Of particular interest is their FSK (and other modes) all-in-one PLL+VCO+PA chips.

We have code in our online store now for the ADF7012 and can be easily ported to Analog's other lineup. This code is a bit banged implementation which is great for low pin count processors that need a single frequency initialized for the solution and also when you dont want to use a dedicated SPI port to communicate with it.

We need more power.     Period.

MCU swap time for the Killer IMU (AHRS+NAV)!

Main MCU is getting an upgrade to 400 MIPS while the video overlay MCU will stay at 80 MIPS. This should give us the extra oomph we need to do the advanced floating point kalman and other things that we wanna do.

Other progress is going great, The Pressure Master is already available (which offloads some of the floating point), and The Magnetometer with tilt is being produced as we speak (a few weeks out with code development). The GOSD will still get a prototyping, and as always we were looking at a more advanced solution (FPGA based) but may continue with the simplified GOSD.

Keep checking back for the tilt mag board! It's gonna be a pretty accurate solution :-)

Our Make-a-wish donation has went out to www.makeawish.org

These donations help chronic and terminally ill children to fulfill their dreams. We've all had some chances at our dreams (hey I met Cindy Crawford one day although she didnt fall in love with me) so let's give these fantastic kids a chance at their's.

Thanks go out to all of you who made it possible for us to make this donation and enrich the lives of some very special kids.

Remember to take part in your community, volunteer, donate and help out in any way you can. Life is not about the money, nor all electronics.

We've added our U.S. Standard Atmosphere Pressure routines to our store! It's 1976 all over again!!! Where's my El Camino?

Dude! Got density altitude? Got pressure altitude? Got humidity compensated values? Then go get our pressure library! It's good upto the Stratosphere.

Also added was our Intersema interfacing code for those lovely little pressure modules they sell, Freescale pressure code with filters, and the Honeywell Humidity sensor with filtering.

Speaking of Intersema, theres a rumor floating around here that someone wants to make a ROV / diving computer with one of them (which I think is a great idea!!!)... so well see in 2010!

Our new year's resolutions?

1. Killer IMU -> professional UAV system with modular addons (TPM and Tilt Magneto)
2. Data Hopper -> real frequency hopping for intelligence applications
3. Thermal imaging with data overlay for UAV applications (on the chalkboard)

did we turn into an Aerospace company? hmmm.... :-)

2010 is looking pretty good.

Have a great New Year's!!