Now that I got a couple of weeks' vacation from the army I finally had the time to work on some new hardware. Last week I made directional antennas for my UAS: thanks to IBCrazy for his fabulous BiQuad tutorial on RCGroups. Only an antenna tracker was missing.
Paparazzi GCS includes an antenna tracker -controller but as I've recently been thinking about possibly moving to some other autopilot(s) I decided that I need a more universal antenna tracker: an "ArduTracker" in this case.
It's based around an Arduino Uno board and uses a DIY laser-cut pan/tilt -mechanism. Essentially the Arduino hijacks the GPS coordinates from the autopilot data stream so it's very easy to modify the source code to work with pretty much any autopilot system available.
The source code to the project and the CADs for the pan/tilt-mechanism are all open source if anyone's interested.
Hardware used:
- Arduino Uno (+ optionally a proto shield)
- 2x Futaba S3305 or similar servos
- 2x 5*11*4mm or similar ball bearings
- M5 bolts, nuts and washers.
- CA glue
- Two directional antennas
- Bits and pieces...
EDIT: Here are the links for the CADs and the source code. For now the source code is only compatible with PPZ until more autopilots are added (this is very easy).
Comments
its been a while since this topic has seen any action. If you're still around sami how did you get on getting your code to talk to APM? I've been attempting to get it running this evening with APM2.5 and 3dr radios but not had much luck.
Programming is not my strong suit, so I apologize if my question/problem seems stupid. I went through the code and found the part where it reads the telemetry data from the comm box, but I still don't understand how to change the syntax. Here is the comm box I'm using. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
http://procerusuav.com/Downloads/TechSheets/TechSheet_COMMBOXv1.1.pdf
Awesome Sami. I'll definitely follow this. Apparently, the ArduStation source code is out that is compliant with APM 2.0 and supports antenna tracking from the mission planner. I do not have the details yet due to lack of hardware, but it looks good on paper!
The current setup requires only one wire from the data-modem (e.g. xbee) and nothing else connected to your computer/rc equipment. But yes it's also possible and very easy to make the setup work through your computer: the arduino already shows up as a COM-port so you only need to configure the GCS to output the NMEA to that port. However I prefer the one-wire-solution as it's simpler and more universal.
Regarding the APM2 compliant version of the source code: it's coming soon. I already found out the page in the wiki that explains the data sentence structure and I'm now just waiting for my APM2 to arrive so that I can debug the code before publishing it.
@Sami In regards to Alexander's question..I am interested in something similar. If I have telemetry from my RC back to the GCS (mission planner) via xbee, on this pages it states that you can get the datastream out of the planner.
Would you be able to modify the code to work with this? I really want to be able to have one computer, one xbee link and then the antenna tracker plugged into the computer. Is this possible?
Sami Finnila, мy poor experience does not allow me to show you the necessary data,but if you will download ariduino, and arducopter firware v.2.4 you will understand syntax of the GPS downlink string of your version of the APM
Awesome. Thanks Sami. I'll keep bugging ya for it ;)
@Hunter: I don't think there is, as of yet, but I'm going to make it myself some time in the near future as I just ordered an APM2 myself.
Anyone have the source code for use with APM 2.0 and ArduPlane?
@Alexander: Sure! The programming part is no problem, I can do that, but I need to know the exact syntax of the GPS downlink string of your version of the ardupilot. AFAIK there are several different formats the different (older) versions of Ardupilot use.
If you can find out documentation on the format of the data stream I'll do the coding for you. It's literally a 15 min job after that.
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