A couple of weeks ago I started building a little quadrocopter. My main reason isn’t actually having it flying nicely, but to learn a bit more in detail about how modern sensors work. All my electronic stuff has been stored in boxes for almost ten years, so I thought it was well about time refresh my mind a bit.

I quite soon realized a lot has happened during these ten years and, among things, found out that my old AVR programmer didn’t work any longer in a modern OS. Nor doesn’t every computer have serial and parallell ports…

Instead of investing in a lot of new equipment, I found an old laptop that actually had a rs232 port. Installing a 32bit version of Windows also solved a lot of driver problems. So, after some struggle, I had a simple development environment up and running and created the mandatory Hello World program on a simple ATmega8515 CPU.

So, now I just needed a fun project to work on. I recently saw this amazing Ted talk about flying robots, and I though I may give it a try myself. Maybe I’ll make it half way and actually make it flying 😉