Comment by Robert M on March 9, 2012 at 1:38pm

I tend to agree with Colin, I doubt most people would go down the high-power route I went down and it would be better to make the station accessible for more people and leave us tinkerers to buy our own upgrades. That should also give an idea about the affordability of my setup... I went a bit overboard on that ;-). I wanted to be able to switch from my dual patch + omni setup to a 3x Yagi setup in the future so I bought a setup that I found on FPVManuals it is certainly not cheap, but I may even be able to put a video camera on the setup without too much of a (weight) issue, RF noise may be another story ;-).

At the moment, however, my first ArduStation has been tethered to my FTDI cable for a couple of days as I try to load the software (I suspect I may have a faulty Uno chip). At least I am learning a lot about the setup this way ;-)

Comment by Paul Feely on March 9, 2012 at 3:47pm

@ Jani - are you planning a jDrones production run of a mega 'station?

JDrones Comment by Jani Hirvinen on March 9, 2012 at 10:17pm

Paul, if we get agreement with Colin and it looks reasonable, i cannot see why not. Then whole community would benefit from this work. 

Comment by Paul Feely on March 10, 2012 at 5:18am

Excellent, I think Colin has done some great work with this a for me it looks perfect for laptop free visits to the field thanks Paul.

Comment by Colin on March 10, 2012 at 9:04am

Thanks Paul, Jani has my approval ;-)

Comment by Robert M on March 15, 2012 at 6:57am

Colin, Jani, I have been kicking around an idea that I wanted to share. As I don't always have a 2nd person with me, I would love to have a ground view recording of my flights, so I was thinking about the possibility of putting a camera on my tracker. There are cameras that have externally controllable variable zoom, so why not enable automated video tracking with the direction and elevation determined by the tracker (as is now the case) but adding a signal for zoom based on GPS distance from home through a seperate output on the station. Fytron has a camera with 36x zoom for instance (http://www.flytron.com/video-equipments/89-fz-36x-zoom-camera-with-...). Of course there would be a lag distance between where the plane is and where the tracker is pointing, but this can be compensated for by zooming out sufficiently.

Best,

Robert

Comment by Colin on March 15, 2012 at 7:19am

Robert, I've wanted to do this too (more ideas than time). Well done for finding an r/c controlled zoom camera- I guess we should add an extra servo out to the board for stuff like this :)

I've yet to complete my tracking code for the new station, but I want to make the movement smooth. For the most part the planes move pretty smoothly, so I reckon it would be reasonable to simply interpolate between readings. As you say, this will suffer from some lag, but in the future we may be able to add some kind of anticipation based on the flight path and bank angle etc.

Cheers,

Colin

Comment by Robert M on March 15, 2012 at 9:49am

This is also the reason for my overpowered servos; slack for crazy ideas and very smooth rotation ;-)
I think many cameras allow you to manipulate zoom through an external input, this one happens to be modded for FPV. Adding a seperate servo connection to handle the zoom would seperate this tracker from all others by a mile (probably at minimal expense).
Possible issues: i) coding, as not every camera will have the same zoom factor this would probably require a setting for that and/or the zoom scale per unit distance between the ground station and the plane. ii) possible differences in signal depending on the camera iii) girlfriends/wives and/or significant others this would put out of a job (luckily the upside would be more stable videos with plane squarely in view, at the right zoom factor).

Comment by Leonardo Lisboa on April 6, 2012 at 6:16am

Hi Colin, this is a great initiative. Ii currently use the standard Ardustation and it works great for quick telemetry and antenna tracking. This will be a great step forward to improve the product.

I appreciate you sharing your project, but just be careful of people that may incentive you to later copy your project and sell as created by them. At least ask for your credits :)...

Keep it up.

Cheers,

Leonardo

Comment by Leigh Green on July 29, 2012 at 5:30am

Colin - where have all your Github files gone for the ArduMega? I'm just experimenting with a few things myself and needed a little boost on a couple of items of code...and schematics for that matter...

Or are they perhaps gone because we are going to see 3DR release it comercially...?

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