When Maynard Hill’s autonomous RC plane made its historic flight across the Atlantic Ocean
a few years ago, Brian Premerlani said to his dad, “Why don’t we do something along those
lines? It might be fun. How hard can it be?” Indeed. Brian and his dad recognized that getting
an RC model airplane to fly across the Atlantic was more than they wanted to commit to, so
they set their sights a little lower. They settled on getting an RC sailplane to fly by itself using
readily available components, most of which were purchased from Spark Fun.
To get their feet wet, they started with an even easier goal, getting an RC truck to navigate by
GPS. They installed a GPS receiver/antenna and an electronic compass on a rapid-prototyping
board and after some modest development and debugging effort, were successful with the
truck.