I've modified Phillip Anthony Smith's Mavlink Ardustation to support an inexpensive tilt/pan antenna platform. RAM is very tight in the software so this is not a laptop/ground station replacement and the original software was oriented towards APM. However, I've been flying many flights with Arducopter 2.0.x and this antenna and have gotten pretty good video performance with much less multipath interference. I still use a second Xbee on a notebook with the Mission Planner and that seems to work pretty well with the Ardustation. This link gives some more details, a demo video of the software with some explanation of the added screens, and the software itself for others to play with. The software is a little rough since it was developed quickly before the 4th of July weekend, but it is fun to watch the antenna follow the quad and I wanted to give a little back to the Arducopter community.
Comments
Add This:
void gcs_handleMessageSysStatus(mavlink_message_t* msg)
{
mavlink_sys_status_t packet;
mavlink_msg_sys_status_decode(msg, &packet);
currentSMode = packet.mode;
currentNMode = packet.nav_mode;
battery = packet.vbat;
return;
}
case MAVLINK_MSG_ID_SYS_STATUS:
{
gcs_handleMessageSysStatus(msg); <--- Add just this line
mavlink_sys_status_t packet;
mavlink_msg_sys_status_decode(msg, &packet);
currentSMode = packet.mode;
currentNMode = packet.nav_mode;
break;
}
Thank you for all these explanations and look forward to this new valuefor the battery.
Again thank you and bravo for having revived our ardustation
The code is using feet for display of altitude - there is a conversion factor in a few computations that should have been a constant. Search in ArduStationPS.pde for the constant "3.280839". This is the conversion factor from meters to feet and removing this value will get you back to meters. I think there are 3 occurrences of this constant.
As far as the voltage, I picked the battery voltage line up from the previous version of Ardustation and have ignored that value since I don't use the APM to measure it (I use my OSD instead). Since it is in the planner it should be in the data, I just need to find the Mavlink message and set the value. I should be able to find it later today and give you the code to add that so that it doesn't display 0.
I have a problem, though apm planner displays the battery voltage and altidude of 213m, while ardustation with your code, and displays 0v 743m for altidude.
I can not understand why;-(
thank you in advance for your help
I'm using the software with AC2 - so that is what I've debugged it for, but I modified the APM version for antenna tracking and I believe it should work with APM 2.x. The Ardustation software should pick up the latitude/longitude/altitude and position the antenna just like I'm doing with the Arducopter. I just haven't tested it since I don't have a second APM for my Skywalker project and haven't had the time. This definitely won't work with APM 1.x without modification.
Hi is this tracking system compatible with APM 2.x or only with APM 1.x like ardustation?
Thanks in advance
Tassos
Ok. I'll be switching out the APM 1280 to put in the 2560 this weekend, I'll go from 2.0.33 to 2.0.38 at the same time. I hope I don't have to do much PID tuning when I upgrade. My antenna pan/tilt unit and arduino pro mini is due for delivery this afternoon :-)
@Heino, what version of AC2 are you running?
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