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
GPRS is a bit old to get my interest but I did take a look at the Kickstarter page... Wow, that price seems crazy for what is being offered. Ten years ago, we were using GPRS modems for chemical plant monitoring and paying a premium for industrialised hardware that survived in those environment.
I'll stick to a 3G/4G connection through a companion computer when it is necessary to go through a phone network. Cheaper and available now.
Hello Alexandru thanks for your comment. There are always new boards and hardware just around the corner. Right now we are using what we think is the best module available for this application. Bitrate is not the most important concern since telemetry doesn't require a lot of bandwidth.
Chris, the other application was not related to drones. It was about activating the blinds and locks at an office via sms. We had the idea of implementing commands like RTL via SMS but thought it was adding too much to the first release. If you have any ideas about that though, let us know and we'll look into it.
GPRS? Feels like a stone age. There are plenty of IoT-oriented 3G modules, and 4G modules started appearing too.
@Tridge - These guys now do 4G public IP addresses. We are using a VPN as well however more for network simplicity than anything as we have a static public 3G IP address.
http://www.beagle.com.au/broadband/mobile_standard.html
It is Optus though.
Please tell us more about that SMS application. Can you text MAVLink commands to the drone? I actually did my first "text commands to drone" back in 2007! It didn't work very well in those days ;-)
Hello Chris, I sent you a tweet before. Yes, it can send and receive SMS and also make phone calls. We actually built another application using SMS on the same module.
Can that module send and receive text messages, too?
Martin thanks for your advice. We haven't had any problems yet and we have tested Airstring for hours and in different environments. The delay is indeed high but the connection is stable both in Mission Planner and Tower :)
From my experience GPRS telemetry and Mission Planner do not get along. There timeouts built into MP are shorter than the latency of the GPRS connection.
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