Discussions

              Greetings, my name is Walter and I recently joined up with diydrones.com. I am a mechanical engineer working and also attending grad school.  I have always had a deep passion for quadcopters, and I recently began my quest to build one of my own design.  Much to my surprise the ground station development has a remarkable resemblance to the core of my research/work.  My research is based on unmanned ground vehicles for both autonomous and/or tele-operated control.  These vehicles are controlled from a laptop (including software) dubbed the Operational Control Unit (OCU), which is essentially the same setup as a quadcopter’s ground station.  My first iteration of this software was fairly successful, but my largest difficulty was displaying a map and all relevant information (current and past locations, shapefiles, area calculation, etc).

               My IDE/”language” that I am using is National Instruments Labview.  All of the operations it performs are very straight forward, but the mapping is done using the Openlayers API with an embedded browser.  The biggest problem I am facing is that I essentially have two programs running; one for the OCU and the other an HTML program (acting as a server on the localhost).  By doing this I basically have two sets of data, and within about two hours it eats all the memory of the computer (for two reasons; first I didn’t expect the amount of data and the large area that needed to be covered).  My point here is that I don’t have a direct communication method (between server and client) so that I only have to deal with one set of data, not two.  Note: I am by no means an expert in web scripting.  An additional requirement that I am still struggling with is that this mapping method must be entirely done without an internet connection.  I’d like to use satellite imagery, but caching has been largely difficult for me to get working well.

               I dug in a little bit with the open source mission planner, and noticed that it uses the .NET framework and the capability to pull in a variety of different mapping services.  Frankly there were so many that I got overwhelmed, and decided to reach out for some assistance.  I am familiar enough with GIS that a good starting point is all I need to “take off,” and was hoping there might be someone who can help.  I do appreciate any assistance at all in this matter, and in time I hope to aid in the development of the mission planner since there are a number of similarities between the two programs.  

Sincerely,

Walter