Ground Station gets an upgrade

I like to spend my time in the field actually flying and not spending hours plugging things in.

Here is the latest upgrade to my Ground Station which provides a single wire from my antenna to my laptop.

All I need to take to fly is the antenna, laptop, plane and an XBox controller.

A single USB cable goes from the laptop into the case on the back of my XBee Patch antenna.

This cable goes into a USB hub.

Plugged into the Hub is:

Xbee for Telemetry
XBox 360 PC interface which turns an XBox controller into a wireless joystick.
WinTV usb capture dongle

Also in the case are my 5.8 Ghz Video RX. I have put the antenna connector on the outside of the case so I can either use a small rubber duck antenna or connect it to my 5.8Ghz patch antenna which also fits on the stand with a short extension cable.

The Video RX outputs to the USB capture card which sends live images over the same USB cable as Telemetry to my APM planner where I overlay the picture.

There is a 2200mAh LiPo which provides power to the video RX. So I don't have to keep opening the case, there is a charger inside the case with a power input on the outside so I simply plug in a power pack to charge it up, or connect it to a power cable I have in my car.

The second photo shows it with the antenna on and you can see the power switch for the Video RX.

The stand it is mounted on is an aluminium commercial speaker stand so it is light, extremely durable and folds up very compactly to sit on the back seat of my car.

On the other side, you can see the long USB cable that enters the side of the case and runs to my Laptop. The Video RX charging connector is underneath.

The tray holds my notebook so that I can use the mouse while holding my plane.

The 900Mhz patch antenna is 14dBi so you don't have to point it directly at the plane unless you are on a long distance mission. The whole center piece swivals and the patch antenna also tilts up and down for more precise alignment.

This setup is for my new Ritewing Zephyr which has almost finished construction. Once its done I'll post pics of it and hopefully I'll get around to making a video of the whole system in operation.

Below you can see the GS being used in the field prior to the latest upgrade (shows the laptop stand in action).

Thanks to Michael for adding Elevon mixing to the Joystick control in the APM planner. That was the final piece of the puzzle to getting this up and running.

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Comments

Richard Unwin November 5, 2011 at 10:52pm

great ground station, what has been your experience so far on range of the 900 mhz datalink signal, do you get anywaring that it is about to drop out?

richie
Dimitri October 21, 2011 at 2:24am

They are other OS on pc than microsoft ones. I will put my groundstation on a custom linux build for example. Moreover, your drone will not crash if you loose the remote connection :/
Toby Mills October 21, 2011 at 2:23am

Frank. I don't control my plane with the joystick. My APM controls my plane. The joystick is used for minor and non critical corrections. If it does stop working it shouldn't matter to a true UAS.
Scott Plunkett October 19, 2011 at 1:10pm

@All, I just started a new thread in a new post about this, looking for help with design / programming, etc. Let's get the ball rolling!
Toby Mills October 19, 2011 at 12:14pm

@Dimitri
I am currently using the XBee Pro.

@Alex

The cost of a USB servo controller would not be much different than buying an APM base board.

I suspect that it would be done so that you could either use an old 1280 or the newer APM.

Chris has talked about moving to a 32bit APM board soon which would make all our current APM's redundant, this would be a great use for recycling them all and many people have spares anyway.
Moderator

Alex October 19, 2011 at 6:09am

@Michael Oborne

I too would love to have antenna tracking, but I would think it would be more usefull to also be able use something like a USB servo controller like on HK GCS? As not everyone has an old APM1280
Dimitri October 19, 2011 at 4:24am

me too :) Do you have xbee pro or xbee xsc ?
Toby Mills October 18, 2011 at 6:33pm

Brilliant, this would be great. Let me know when its ready. I have a spare APM which I'm assuming should also work so I'll be happy to help where I can and also test.
Developer

Michael Oborne October 18, 2011 at 4:59pm

Toby, just a fyi, i plan on implementing an output for the planner to control antenna tracking on an old 1280 board i have. my antennas arived today.
at this point in time i will try outputting in nmea and will add a custom "home" message so it can track correctly.
Toby Mills October 18, 2011 at 1:58pm

I'm using two 4S 3700mAh batteries in the zeph so its a reasonably heavy build (2kg).

Most of the people with Zephs are running them flat out for FPV and with batteries around this size they seem to get about 30 to 40 minutes.

As I won't be going for any speed records I'm hoping for at least an hour, but I'm pretty sure if I take it easy I might be able to get it out to 120 minutes. I'll be happy with an hour though. I'm running a big 12 x 7 prop but I've left enough room to put an even bigger prop on if I need to squeeze out some more endurance.

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