I'm in a team to be competing in this year's Australian outback UAV challenge and we'll be using one of their failsafe devices (hopefully with Ardupilot mega when it comes out), their GCS designed to work with their failsafe device looks really nice and does a lot of what we want but it's designed to work with the attopilot telemetry format.
Cheers
Andrew
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A very thorough consideration of the possible scenarios. If I may add my 2 cents worth:
- I would think that if you were going to drive a couple of servos for an antenna tracker (say), then it would generally be a stationary installation.
- I think that deriving the launch co-ordinates from the first transmission will work much of the time, except for when the GCS or computer crashes or runs out of power and needs to be restarted, and then you are toast. Unless of course the launch co-ordinates are saved to disk, but then you may as well just enter them yourself into the config file.
- I agree, a GPS connected to the groundstation is the deluxe solution, and actually not impossibly difficult to do, but perhaps overkill for a first attempt.
Andrew.
Good ideas Krzys, as always. Perhaps the Flexipilot GCS will have these excellent features :-)
From memory I don't think that Ardupilot telemetry has the right fields to calculate a vector to thegenerate these features. At least not yet - I'm sure it will evolve to include it soon enough.
And Gary, I am way too shy and boring for podcasts, please noooo!
A few dreams:
From operational point of view,
I am wondering if it is not better to ad heading+distance to plane UAV as seen from takeoff point (a compass with a dial).
Personally I prefer to show battery cell voltage rather than cumulative voltage.
reason: the autopilot can scale/renormalise, but also you can show multiple cells at once if the protocol permits.
The scale must have some room for died LiPo, LiIon etc.
Ardupilot / UDB GCS
There's also a short user guide. As I do not actually own an Ardupilot or a UDB (shame on me), there may well be bugs. Happy to fix; please just let me know.
Cheers,
Andrew
He has just created a great product.
I might take a couple if beers from him mind, next time I'm in Oz
Timing "soonish", definitely well before the Australian UAV Outback Challenge.
And yes, absolutely, we will share.
Andrew.
If GCS code is shared/available then probably some one here will make it work with ardupilot but it is upto Millswoodeng to share or not to share.... , anyway I am also very much interested in their FS device but haven't figured out a way to use it effectively in my setup so far