Ardustation Mega with Graphic LCD

I’d like to share my latest hardware ground control station. I call it the ArduStation Mega.

It retains all the features found on the DIYDrones Ardustation, as well as my Ardustation Uno but with some very important upgrades.

Notably the main processor has been upgraded to an ATmega2560 giving 8 times the size of both flash and ram, amongst other things :)

Also there is a graphical LCD that should provide a larger, more user friendly display.

The extra serial ports (4 in total) will enable future expansions as and when required. One is dedicated to the USB for loading software as well as potentially being used to allow a computer to share the installed Xbee.

If you don’t want to use an Xbee, or want to use more than one, that’s fine- three of the serial ports are broken out to the left of the board. These could also be used for adding a GPS unit, or perhaps a bluetooth to pc link for example.

Also broken out is the i2c port, so you can link it up to a magnetometer if need be (could make for simpler antenna tracking alignment)

A micro SD card will allow data logging, parameter saving, mission uploading and hopefully more!

The rotary encoder (like a radio’s jog dial) should help with faster navigation / value editing. The buttons are also on a separate PCB such that they can be mounted flush with the display or separately subject to enclosure constraints. (Also this means I can change the layout of the buttons)

The battery supply and Xbee RSSI are connected to give health information on voltage and telemetry link signal strength. Additional analog pins are also broken out for monitoring external sensors.

The PCB has been sized to match the dimensions of the LCD, giving a neat install that can be attached with screws and spacers. All of the components are mounted on the inside as well, such that the total unit size is minimised.

As with my Uno version, I use a single cell LiPo for the battery source, with an efficient step up regulator for the 5v supply. There’s also inbuilt USB charging.

The antenna tracking will be achieved by the two servo headers on the right hand side of the board. These also have a solder jumper for selecting off-board power in case heavy duty servos are to be used.

Please let me know what you think!

If you want to see more, here's a video of me showing it off:

Colin,
impressive work and great development! Since this is the third iteration you must be an expert on groundstation issues by now :) I have been playing with the idea of adding an LCD to an Arduino Uno and turning it into an APM groundstation but so far have been put off by problems that other people on the Arduino have with LCD's, especially GLCD's.
I'd like to use the display for text mostly (if I want graphics I can also use a full-fledged laptop GCS) but it would be nice to have more than 4 lines of it while still being readable in daylight. Would be great if you could report on your experience with the display shown above. You said it is essentially the same as this one, right?

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/710

Originally I had thought about getting one of these:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9568

But now I'm not sure whether it would be worth the extra complexity of more control wires and getting a graphic LCD right away..hmmm

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Comments

jbabio January 23, 2012 at 8:59am

@Colin: Nice Work! Do you plan to sell this?
Colin January 23, 2012 at 2:51am

Robert M, I added USB telemetry pass through to my test code yesterday and found it worked very well. It was equivalent to having the xbee plugged directly into the PC, whilst retaining full functionality of the ardustation. Result :-)
Colin January 22, 2012 at 9:09am

Cheers Robert. I've extracted the BOM from eagle and posted it here:

https://github.com/cgwood/ArdustationMega/blob/master/PCB/ArduStati...
Robert McC January 21, 2012 at 4:46pm

Colin: Great work!

Do you have a bill of material that goes with the PCB?
Colin January 21, 2012 at 10:10am

Thanks Darkstar. Yes, the intention is to pass received data from the xbee through the USB connection for that purpose. I haven't yet coded and tested this, but will report back once I've done it :)
Robert M January 21, 2012 at 10:07am

Great stuff Colin! I'm experimenting with the Ardustation now and your upgrade seems to address everything that I would hope to see in a new version. Does the USB connection serve to relay info to a laptop with Mission Planner or other GCSs as well?
Colin January 21, 2012 at 6:24am

Andre,

I just had a quick look at the sparkfun LCD and it appears that it is actually physically smaller than mine- the same number of pixels, just a smaller display.

Colin
Colin January 21, 2012 at 6:17am

Thanks Andre,

Yes that is essentially the same LCD as mine, with slightly different pin mappings. For text alone, I would lean towards the 4x20 LCD with the Uno- due to requiring less wires, and probably less flash (not sure exactly how much they differ though).

You'll need to make sure that you have pins left over for buttons etc. and the graphic display requires 8 pins more than the text display. Flash space is at a premium with the new mavlink protocol and code already exists for the Uno with 4x20 display, which will give you a good head-start for coding what you need your Uno to do :-)

Having a display you can look at while flying shouldn't have too much data on it at once anyway as you can't afford to stare at it. You'll find having pages dedicated to different tasks a lot more manageable in the field.

Regards,

Colin
Andre S January 21, 2012 at 5:44am

Colin,
impressive work and great development! Since this is the third iteration you must be an expert on groundstation issues by now :) I have been playing with the idea of adding an LCD to an Arduino Uno and turning it into an APM groundstation but so far have been put off by problems that other people on the Arduino have with LCD's, especially GLCD's.
I'd like to use the display for text mostly (if I want graphics I can also use a full-fledged laptop GCS) but it would be nice to have more than 4 lines of it while still being readable in daylight. Would be great if you could report on your experience with the display shown above. You said it is essentially the same as this one, right?

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/710

Originally I had thought about getting one of these:

http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9568

But now I'm not sure whether it would be worth the extra complexity of more control wires and getting a graphic LCD right away..hmmm
Colin January 20, 2012 at 5:19am

Thanks Wojciech,

I'll share my code when I get home. Currently I am running a modified version of my original Ardustation code for the new hardware. If it's specifically mavlink that you are interested in I can recommend the Ardustation-ii code as potentially being easier to read through.

Cheers,

Colin

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