Raising Inovation
In June of 2014, a team of interns at Texas Instruments were given a Beaglebone black and were asked to innovate. The result of 6 weeks of research, design, and testing is what they call: Quadcape.
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With at suite of TI analog components at their disposal, they created advanced current sensing and voltage sensing circuitry to monitor the consumption of each motor and the Beaglebone Black, all in real time.
Here is their video submission as part of the 2014 TI intern design challenge
As part of this challenge, this team managed to create a quadcopter with a 10dof IMU, current and voltage monitoring, wireless, computer vision, and a user interface accesible through a terminal or webpage.
The Quadcape comes with wifi and bluetooth modules in addition to the built in USB connection that comes with the Beaglebone Black. This means that users can connect to this revolutionary cape however they wish. Quadcape works seamlessly out of the box. For advanced users, however, this UI gives acces to advanced sensor diagnostics and calibration utilities, stability tuning software, computer vision, and access to adding their own scripts.
An Electrical Engineer from the Universiry of Florida, Salvador is interning at Texas Instruments as an operational amplifier test engineer. He has done the I2C interfaces for the acceleration, gyro, compass, and barometric pressure sensor. He did most of the Altium routing and design of the Quadcape circuitry. He wrote the Terminal UI for the Quadcape that allows controlling Quadcape trhough USB,WIFI, or Bluetooth..
Phong is operational amplifier validation engineer interning at Tesxas Instruments for a second summer. He is an Electrical Engineering Junior at Georgia Tech. He has done much of the low level sensor interfaces and python wrappers for those. He also did much of the layout for the PCB.
Brian is an operational amplifier applications engineer interning at Texas Instruments from the University of Illinois. He is a Freshman in Electrical Engineering. He designed the original website at
