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APM 1280 as Antenna Tracker

Posted by Emiliano Fortunati on September 6, 2011 at 11:48am

Hi, I'm searching for a project to re-use an old APM 1280 as Antenna Tracker,

 

Do you know anything interesting?

 

I'm very happy to fly a worderfull APM 2560, but now I need and "Ardustation".

 

With the new feature of APM Mission Planner (ctrl-g) that allow a serial output of NMEA data is it very hard to build an antenna tracker with ours old 1280 boards?

 

Thanks a lot to everyone for the great job they are doing!!! (& sorry for my poor english...)

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Replies

  • Albert Miralles May 18, 2013 at 4:46am

    Hi! Finally I can read GGA code, but I think MP don't work fine, it send wrong data in serial output, it don't agree from data on screen's bottom. For example

    MP LAT : 39.5878 (decimal format) must be GPS_FIX= 0 or 1 or 2

    Arduino LAT 39.2474 (unknow format, and don't change) GPS_FIX = 3¿!?!¿!?!

    Somebody has any idea?

  • Magnus September 7, 2011 at 12:59pm

    How about the following approach:

    * Align the antenna tracker with the help of a compass.

    * Connect the XBee directly to your PC and the Mission Planner

    * Attach the Mega 1280 to a USB port on the PC via a USB-Serial converer.

    * Let the Mission Planner send NMEA data to that serial port

    * You need to store the antenna location in the Mega 1280 to be able to calculate direction to planes location.

    * Add a button on the Mega 1280. When your plane is starting to send reliable data to the Mission Planner and after pressing cntrl-G, press the button and store current position and altitude as home. This requires that your plane is somewhere near the antenna.

    * After releasing the button you should be all set.

    * I guess you could store the first position you get from the Mission Planner as home automatically as long as you get valid data.

     

    The code for the Tracker should not be that complex:

    * Parse incoming nmea data

    * If button is pressed store incoming data as home else

    * calculate a vector from home to current position

    * Set pan and tilt servo to a position matching the vector.

     

    something like that...

     

    /Magnus

     

     

     

  • Emiliano Fortunati September 7, 2011 at 11:37am

    Hi Darren, thanks a lot,

     

    do you have any documentation about the pan/tilt servos connections?

     

    and how i can connect the 1280 to the HK?

     

    What I think is that I wish to use APM Mission Planner connected with the Xbee to my plane and have  an antenna tracker guided by the NMEA data from another serial port.

     

    TNX, bye!!

     

     

     

  • Darren September 6, 2011 at 7:13pm

    you can this Ardutracker-mega code I scrambled together a while back; and use HappyKillmore's GCS for an antenna tracking using your 1280.

    ArduTracker_Mega.rar

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