Unless I'm mistaken I feel that diydrones would rather all flights use a Tx, but are we not very close to a point where we can to put an end of the Tx for drone multirotors as the primary flying device. After all this is 'diydrones' not 'diyrc' and a Tx is just not very drone like.
I know there are some bad a$$ flyers out there, but for me I want more of a drone and less of an RC.
Push a button, take off, do a mission and return back home and autoland, use virtual controls if needed, more drone like.
With all the new functionality from that Arthur Benemann has packed into the latest droid planner 2, including 1 button take offs, follow me, dronie, guided and large screen phones and tablets it looks like we may be close. All the strides that DJI and Parrot has done with virtual joysticks that are extremely accurate cant we get away from requiring the Tx.
We have geofence RTL, battery low RTL and tons of failsafes, we have continue mission if lost signal for those long missions.
The Tx is a great backup to the phone, but I have no backup for my Tx anyhow so why would I need a backup for my phone/tablet. If battery on phone dies it can return launch.
Somehow the new Ghost is not even requiring a Tx at all.
Just my thoughts as id like to say bye forever of the requirement of a Tx :-)
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We're prototyping a ground control station at the moment using our Wing control device. There is an image of the design-in-progress below.
You can operate the mission planner and fly the aircraft with the Wing so don't need a normal transmitter at all. However, that means everything goes through the PC link and ideally we want to remove this as a potential failure point. We'll have to split the output from the Wing so one branch goes straight to a separate transmitter PCB and aerial. Until then, we're keeping a spare twin-stick transmitter ready.
IMO, none of this matters until a better power source is available, such as a practical fuel cell to increase flight times.
The nemesis of every electric powered vehicle is the battery.
Well that would be ok for those who do not do this as a hobby, for fun doing it your way would take most of the fun out of flying the actual machines , and I think that most of us got into this because we wanted to actually fly and control the craft.
just my 2 cents thoughts.
There are obvious major benefits to standard physical stick configurations for safety and control over any non physical application. But I do believe there will soon come a day that this will change and the almost endless amount of safety benefits still to be unlocked of computer assisted flying with an application like DroidPlanner will out weigh the safety of a completely manual stick in the very near future, such as preventing take offs within 3 miles from an airport, near a hospital, highway or other public safety locations something that a Trad Tx just can not do and the FAA wants to prevent. Don’t worry I do not want to take away your Trad Tx controller option or say that people should not learn flying safety, but there is no reason to not start thinking that soon manual control will just become an optional part of our every day flying.
> by traditional Tx you mean a dedicated box with two sticks
Yes, and very nicely put. Of course a dedicated device is a good requirement for now and the future but can still be small and portable and provide more functionality than a Trad Tx for someone in the field.
I haven't touched RC sticks for months. I just use Droidplanner (and AC3.2 with EKF turned on) and often just over Bluetooth -- it's the ideal mobile-first experience, especially when you're doing auto missions like mapping, scanning and dronies.
Hi All,
I think it might help to point out that a LOT of the RC/TX on the market are based on AVR/ARM chips and load up open software to do their job,
and a lot of the modern RC protocols are bidirectional in nature ie rc out telemetry back.
The RC RF xmitter is generally a separate firmware in a lot of cases than the rc joystick/interface processor ie OpenTX E9x etc
in the case of the openLRS system the TX/RX modules are the same circuitry in nature just a different firmware load.
ie a Orange OpenLRS 1W xmitter module can be used airborne as a receiver(by a licensed ham(US)).
While control is by a specialized rc protocol and telemetry at present I wonder if it would be practical to rebase rc control in MAVLINK/OPlink packets.. something tells me too much latency would be there for real time control in manual modes.
I DONT see an issue to getting rid of trad TX just preserve a real time control path with physical controls to be accessed with sufficient precision(gameboy/game joysticks need not apply) by the UAS operator,it can all be over the same RF xmission as far as I am concerned.
hzl
btw the telemetry radios are so easily interfered with its scary.. ie light up 2 GCS stations on same net as on target vehicle (my experiments show interference between the 2 GCS) :( I would hate to see something done with an sdr such as hackrf or even simple rfcat..
How do you feel about using a PC joystick/gamepad going through the telemetry radios? For the past 6 months, I've been using strictly USB style controls for all my APM vehicles (fixed-wings, multirotors, and ground rovers) without a traditional RC receiver on-board at all. I have 100% success rate (100+ flights), even when things go wrong with the flight controller.
Here's a couple samples of what I'm talking about (keep in mind the videos are not specifically made to show strictly joystick/gamepad control, I'll have to make a dedicated video one of these days showing just that):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH4QNt1boOE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w03cOizsDzQ
and yes the device you show IS uber cool!! even with using gamepad joysticks... :(
hzl
Cool...especially the surface pro with the gamepad over a large laptop, a researcher could use the same device for his work and fly/guide the drone without the need of bringing a Trad Tx in the field, just an extra little game controller. If MP was a full screen RT app that could "help" prevent issues arriving from email coming in although of course not eliminate them.
There is also the issue of lockups etc, as any device even a trad Tx it could fail. If this computer was rebooted or otherwise die would/could the RTL be engaged or is that strictly a Rx function at the moment of the APM?
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