The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority finally broke the silence about the use of UAVs in the Kenyan airspace. This was probably provoked a couple of drone articles and incidences that have been published recently. Just recently, a writer for a local daily wrote this article about drones in Kenya flying into strong legal winds.

If you are visiting Kenya, you better leave your drone home at the moment. There was also this guy who was recently fined about 500 Dollars for flying his drone in a national park in Kenya.

On the bright side, they at least left some open window for us to try and seek approval from the Ministry of Defence. I hope things work out well.

Hi Folks,

I have been trying out a telemetry bridge setup. The main aim is to be able to use Droid Planner/Andropilot on android or even mission planner without the telemetry module hanging around the tablet or PC.

My setup is as follows:

AIRBORNE: APM with 3dr telemetry module

BRIDGE: Android Device that supports USB host. In my case, I used a tablet called ODYS running 4.2 jellybean. I installed an app called MAVCELL. Link to playstore. 

The app relays seria MAVLINK traffic from an FTDI device via a USB OTG cable through a TCP/IP connection. Includes an internal TCP/IP server or can connect as a client. Allows bi-directional communication. Developed specifically for passing MAVLink UAV traffic from the DIYDrones/3dRobotics APM2.0/2.5 drone controller telemetry through the cellular network to a Ground Control Station (GCS) such as Mission Planner.

In my trial, i set up the android tablet as a portable hotspot.

DROID PLANNER: I ran droid planner on a samsung galaxy camera. The galaxy is connected to the tablets wifi network.

In droid planner, i set up the connection type to TCP, and set up the IP address to the tablets IP address. In my case, 192.168.43.1. I set the port number to 8080. This is the port number assigned by MAVLINK.

I tested the setup on ground and I was able to get good telemetry data on the galaxy. I havent tested the wifi range, battery time on the devices, reliability etc. When i get to fly again, I will test the setup.

I also connected my laptop to the tablets wifi and connected to APM using mission planner through TCP. Same address and port number. This also worked like a charm! Infact, i had both the droid planner and mission planner connected at the same time. I got telemetry data on both devices.

Later, I want to try to set up a dynamic DNS client app on the tablet (Bridge). This might enable remote connection to the APM from anywhere on the internet.

In theory, all this should work. It would be nice if more guys try out this setup to find out whether it would be reliable. I see this as a cheap way of setting up a telemetry bridge as lots of us have spare android devices lying around.

Best regards from Kenya.

I'm very impressed by how my newly built Tarot t960 performed an autolanding in relatively strong winds with ArduCopter 3.1. I haven't spent so much time tuning the copter but the auto-landing was quite impressive. Landed back at the exact same spot where it took off. Winds were about 25km/h.

Thanks to the development team.

It would be interesting to feed IMU data from APM to this motion cockpit. http://www.acesim.com/main.html

Someone please tell me if this is possible. Im thinking of building the cockpit. If its possible to link it to APM, I will have 10X motivation!.