As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve done some investigation concerning the i2c bus on the ar.drone. I just wanted to share the i2c tools used to probe the bus and a couple of results with you real quick. A link to the tools compiled for the drone can be found at the end of this post. Probing the two i2c busses yields the following results:

# i2cdetect -y 0
     0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 49 -- -- -- -- -- --
50: 50 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 5d -- --
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
# i2cdetect -y 1
     0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  a  b  c  d  e  f
00:          -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
10: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
20: -- 21 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
30: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
40: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
50: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
60: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
70: -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

i2c 0, address 5d is the bottom camera i2c 0, address 50 is the 24C32WI eeprom

Top view (side with ground camera)

1: Camera, I2C bus 0 address 5d
2: I2C connectors for I2C Bus 0 arrive here
3: DRAM cache
4: Connector to navigation board, at least one serial port
5: USB driver SMSC USB3317
6: Connector to front camera, probably not an I2C device
7: External connection port with TTYS0 serial port and USB port
8: ROCm Atheros AR6102G-BM2D wireless
9: Power supply for the engines
10: Ground
11: VCC +5V

Bottom view

I will soon need a personal website including a list of publications, so I thought: Wouldn’t it be great if that was automatically generated from my BibTeX file? In cases like this, I always remember a great quote from Terence Parr:

Why spend 5 days coding something by hand that you could spend five years automating?

I agree, although I try not to loose myself in that kind of work. Anyway, the result can be found here!

About two weeks ago I felt the need to try out the Aiptek V10 LED Micro Projector and it actually sucks a lot less than I thought. I am still thinking about selling it again but it was a nice thing to play with and it fulfilled its purpose.

What I found to be very problematic is encoding videos for the aiptek with my mac (same problem with linux or other unix-based systems I guess). There are a couple of pitfalls and it took me about 5 hours to figure every detail out so don’t waste as much time as I did and try what I came up with!