John Wiseman and Pat Hickey of the Mavelous team have been making great strides with this HTML-based MAVLink GCS, which can run in any browser. You can see a very cool live demo of it here, and follow the project here. 3DR is supporting the project, so look for products from us soon that will allow you to use any device, including phones and tablets, as your GCS for ArduCopter/Plane in the field.
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I also tend to think that there isn't much that a ground control station needs to do that requires super high performance.
I had an idea in the shower the other morning ( all my best ideas arrive while I shampoo ). I thought it would be cool to send a Drone either across the US or around the world.
GeoCache people do this all the time. They take a little toy pirate or something, put a note on it "Send me to Australia", stick it in a cache and it'll eventually hitchhike around the world. (Geocache)
So, back to drones.
To do a cross country flight, it would take a lot of people to retrieve, charge, reprogram, and launch the drone. But if there were a website where people could watch the flight and know where to go to help the drone do another leg (and sign the drone log book), it might just work.
I have a "dumb" Slinger I would donate.... Never flown. I have no idea how far a drone can fly. I've seen some mentions of 200k, can that be true? I would think even a 100k would be stunning.
Any ways, that's what I would do with the Mavlink web browser.
That is awesome. Great work
John: yes, you are right... an wifi is too little range for running a drone...
I'm part of the OpenROV project, and we have that approach (arduino connected to a linux board running a web server and controlled directly by any normal browser), but we don't have the connection problem: we just have a wired ethernet connection in the tether that goes from the surface to the sub :)
John, looks like a pretty steady 1 FPS.
Video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxzCRaXB6W4
Looks very cool !
Mark if you go to http://mavelousdemo.appspot.com/?debug it will tell you how many frames-per-second you're getting on that Kindle; I'd be curious to know.
Simone, I like that idea, but you need something that can do real wifi (or gsm etc.) & http if you want to be able to use an iPad or iPhone.
Dennis: Besides showing the data for one drone to multiple browsers (which I would have liked to have done at the Drone Games, if there had been any vehicles there that spoke mavlink), another "multiplayer" feature I'd like to add would be showing info for multiple drones in one browser. Then add an internet server where people can publish their data in realtime, and you can point mavelous at it and see all the arducopters etc. that are flying at any given time.
Works very well on my Nexus 7. Sweet
Boston UAV. That's confusing, but no fear. The protocol version number all is within MAVlink.1.0
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