We introduced Airstring to this community some weeks ago and we received a lot of feedback which has gone into the campaign and into the project itself.
Today we announce that the Airstring project is live on Kickstarter and you can reserve your own Airstring module to connect your drone to the internet using GSM technology
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/215849561/airstring-gsm-telemetry-for-your-drone
Let's bring drones online!
Comments
Paul, Great! I'd like to credit Andre K. from DIYDrones for pointing out this issue.
"For users who don't want to depend on 3dr parties, we will also publish the server code and you can run the server yourself."
Perfect, i was worried about relying on 3rd party servers for the future.
Andrew we currently don't support 4G, only GPRS.
Your approach is the best solution we could find, that is why we started developing Airstring, first for ourselves, then as a product.
Like you said, setting up a VPN is not ideal, but routing traffic from mobile devices and to mobile devices isn't easy either, very often IPs are not public and sometimes NAT tables are symmetric and pose many problems.
We want to make things as easy as possible, so we have a server with a domain name where both the Airstring air module and the Ground Control Station can access.
For users who don't want to depend on 3dr parties, we will also publish the server code and you can run the server yourself.
It is basically Mavlink over UDP with some changes to add information and configurations and to encrypt the data stream.
the new 4G 700MHz band seems to be the ideal one in Australia at the moment (both Optus and Telstra are deploying in that band).
We use 4G in a couple of our aircraft now, but we do it via a companion computer. One problem we had is that carriers in Australia don't give out public IP addresses any more, so we needed to setup a VPN in order to get a telemetry link. That works well but is quite a bit of extra effort for users.
What routing strategy are you thinking of using? Would packets go via some of your own cloud servers, or do you have some other arrangement? Is it just MAVLink over UDP?
Andrew, like you said, we are targeting the professional market, although we have also gotten interest from hobby users. I am glad you find it useful!
We use a quadband modem (850/900/1800/1900Mhz bands), so it is compatible with all carriers and countries. Yes, you use a NanoSim
I think this could be very useful for professional users. A bit expensive for hobby users.
what bands and modulations are supported? I assume you put in any carriers SIM card? What SIM size?
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