I'm just diving into all of this aerial surveying bit. I have a question. I do have experience with APM 2.5, but not a lot... Here it goes.
I am confused as to what cable I need, the simple USB with a home made servo plug mod, or the expensive gentWIRE-USB cable.... Are they used for different purposes? Or is new firmware changed the need for the expensive gentWIRE cable.... Here are the pages I am getting info from. I have searched threads and have not found this direct answer.
http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-chdk-camera-control-tutorial/#3_Flying_with_your_camera
Additionally if these cables plug into the actual output ports or the "A" ports i.e. A0, A1, A2... etc I seem to be hung up on that as well.
I would like to be able to survey via the camera getting triggered via DISTANCE, not an timed interval (for obvious wind and ground speed changes). Also would be nice to be able to start this process at a certain wp if flying a long ways to get to the survey point, so it is not taking pics the whole way... Please enlighten me, thanks for your patients and time.
Replies
I followed the first link form the wiki you posted:
http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-apm-to-chdk-camera-link-tuto...
I made the cable with a regular usb, but one of the ends and put in a servo connector, plugged it to the A9 port as stated (although I think you can configure this on the parameters), set up the APM as per the wiki, and installed CHDK on the camera, and it works for distance triggering. Pretty straight forward if you follow that WIKI.