Blogs

Fully integrated ground control station

Posted by Sam Worthington on April 28, 2015 at 8:00am

3689648113?profile=original

I've mentioned on a couple of posts over the last few months that we've been hard at work developing a fully integrated ground control station and gave it the first public airing at Skytech in London last week. It is built around the patented Wing control device to enable both manual piloting and mission planner editing with one hand. The other hand is free to operate aircraft systems and camera gimbal through the keyboard and secondary joystick.

  • Fully-featured outdoor workstation
  • 24” Outdoor viewable screen
  • Laptop and storage compartment
  • In-built telemetry
  • Integrated foldable legs
  • Total weight 16.5 kg

It's been a lot of work getting this far and I'd really appreciate any feedback.

Cheers,

Sam

Tags: control, gcs, ground, station, uav
E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • Sam Worthington February 8, 2016 at 4:58am

    Here are few photographs of our latest Wing GCS build.

    They were taken before we fitted the aerials to the mounts on either side of the screen. We've also replaced the laptop with an Intel NUC to give a lot more space under the panel.

    Comments are appreciated.

    Cheers,

    Sam

    3702179875?profile=original

    3702179900?profile=original

  • Sam Worthington September 10, 2015 at 6:50am

    I've created a short (4-question) survey to try and get an idea what people think of the Wing. It's specific to the Wing rather than the Wing GCS and covers other areas beyond UAVs but I'd really appreciate feedback.

    I'm also really interested in how people manage with their current set up for flying UAVs. I'm talking really about mapping work and other automated flying. I know there are lot of people on here building their own GCS but it surprises me the aren't that many solutions out there. I personally don't think strapping a phone to a transmitter is the answer but this seems to be the most common approach from the big manufacturers.

    Our Wing GCS is a big unit and is too expensive for people experimenting with UAV mapping work but I can't help but wonder everytime I see a laptop balance on a sandwich box or someone with one-hand on TX, one hand on keyboard that perhaps we should look at more affordable solution too..?

    Sam

    Worthington Sharpe

    Wing: Beyond the Mouse
    The Wing combines full 3D control with the precision of a high-end laser mouse. Much of the interest so far has been for use with Uninhabited Aerial…
  • Sam Worthington April 29, 2015 at 7:22am

    Hi Aaron, the Wing on it's own is £825 ($1275 at today's rates) plus shipping and taxes. This is the developer model, which is fully working and supported by us but hasn't been through any CE or certification.

    Again, we're building them to order so I would need to confirm the delivery time.

    Sam

  • Aaron Scantlin April 29, 2015 at 7:10am

    Can you give us a rough idea of the price on just the Wing?  As a hobbyist, I don't think I need all the bells and whistles that the Wing GCS features, but I'd be interested in seeing how intuitive the Wing itself is for multirotor control.

  • Sam Worthington April 29, 2015 at 1:23am

    Thanks for the comments. To answer the questions:

    1. We're custom building them to order at £6200, or about $9500 at today's rates. As for the price for a fully-certified production version, I'll have to keep you updated.
    2. There is some information on the Worthington Sharpe website and I'll try and get some more detailed specifications up soon.
    3. We wanted to build a decent work platform with big screen that you can comfortably use for a long work period. The size made it difficult to keep the weight much lower. It is a bit heavier than we hoped but it's manageable. (I hauled more than that up Mount Whitney in my younger days. Although I was carrying less belly then and it wasn't in a suitcase, so maybe that's not a good comparison.) A smaller tripod mounted version is on the plan.
    4. The 24" monitor is made by Litemax.  Luminance is 1000 cd/m2, 5000:1 contrast ratio. We can configure the shutters to work as a shade too but we've not found it necessary so far.
    5. We started with the antennas behind the screen in the hope that the range would be reasonable and to keep everything neat. I don't think this was a great idea, and in practice we've mounted the antennas externally to avoid potential interference problems. I'm working on a folding mount that swings the antennas out above the screen. Some feed-thru's for mounting on external pole is probably also a good idea too.

    We'd really like to do a waterproof version too, but thought it was a bit ambitious to start with.

    Cheers,

    Sam

  • radiof8 April 28, 2015 at 11:40pm

    What outdoor readable monitor did you used? And how you mount telemetry antenas? Why antenas aren't outside of the box? Very nice idea with this legs 

  • Hans Miller April 28, 2015 at 11:09pm

    16.5 Kg? Does it come with a trailer?

  • Cala April 28, 2015 at 3:57pm

    It's looks nice but little heavy.

  • Admin
    Morli April 28, 2015 at 10:57am

    :Looks great so far, keep it coming Good luck

  • Doug Walmsley April 28, 2015 at 9:25am

    What do you expect the cost to be when your GCS goes into production?  Is there a URL with specifications available?

This reply was deleted.