First of all I know I can track using the mission planner and a computer... but in real life no one wants to carry around a computer.
I have been researching antenna trackers. I like the idea of sending the information back from the plane through the audio feed. I can not seem to find any system that is not independent from the ardupilot.
I know the ardupilot does a lot of calculations but surely it can be sent and decoded for use by an arduino. I know just enough to think its possible.
I've also read a lot of people who have asked for this but no one seems to ever say its impossible, if so please let me know so I can move on.
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Thank you!!! This is what im looking for. any details on how to connect the Pixhawk to the audio of a transmitter?
no never bothered to get so little data at slow refresh rate just to send over audio channel, and make it a read-only feature.
I think you too might find two way telemetry useful.
you can connect the stream from a telemetry radio both to the antenna tracker, and a phone/tablet using BT or USB - or IP(wifi)for that matter. Check out Droidplanner and Andropilot.
That would be cool if I had an android device, I do have a telemetry transmitter and receiver but I don't have a laptop, I have been trying to get mission planner on my Raspberry Pi but that has proved very difficult.
APM planner has a Linux version as far as I know.
Have not tested it on the RPI though.
Will give it a shot later tonight
please tell, the Linux version works great,this seems to be a great idea.
if you do get it working please let me know. I've tried about 3-4 different ways and none work for me... could also be because I'm not a Linux user to begin with tho.
I'll give it a shot.
Since the Linux version of APM Planner is for either Ubuntu 13 of 14 I think it should run on Raspbian since Ubuntu is based on Debain and Raspian is basically just a port of Debian mad to run on the RPI.
I'll let you know later tonight / tomorrow morning.
immersionrc does this in the ezosd and has an iphone app that grabs the audio from the audio channel. It uses it's own GPS.
If you're looking to do this yourself with apm and arduino, you should be able to hook up an arduino mini or so on the UART of the ardupilot and use an encoding scheme to generate an audio signal. AFSK is an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XvINTDkPi0
https://github.com/slepp/ax25
The mic input of a transmitter is usually very sensitive and 1Vpp, but you need to check what you're allowed to output.
You could look into using the iphone or android to do the decoding instead. I never looked into it, but you could have a look if you can get access to the mic input to see if you can decode the signal there.
http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php/topic,19648.0.html
I was thinking more of decoding it on the ground and not having to send an arduino up with the plane. seems odd that APM basically requires you to have a computer and mission planner to get all that data.