Discussions

I know that UAVs legally in western countries must be flown LOS but the elephant in the room is that they are NOT being flown LOS (at least, they speck out), they are being flown as far as the video signal will go, and people spend a lot of time trying to get directional antennas to increase that video range. That is just the nature of this hobby there is very little point buying a 1.68m plus plane and putting on goggles, then flying it around a 500m square field !

I'm just stating that to head off the "why would you want need this?" question :)

So I have an idea for antenna tracking and telemetry that would use GPRS quad band to send updates.

My dumb question is: Arduino shields out there for quad band GPRS modem integration, are they impossible to mate with the ArduPilot Mega stack as it stands? Are any and all standard shields impossible to mate? for example LCD displays, touch OLED shields etc etc?

if so, what would be the best way for the ArduPilot Mega control loop to talk to a GPRS sending module? get another regular Arduino up and running, with GPRS shield, and talk via ... ?

thanks!

And by the way I have a related idea: instead of OSD integration, put an OLED or other sunlight readable screen in the field of view of the FPV camera and have it show only a few important things..