Hello to all,
I used a part of the Ardupilot legacy software plus code from Melih Karakelle and from Dennis Frie and "build" around an Open DIY Antenna Tracker - OpenDiyAT.
It needs only sentences from a gps receiver unit (gprmc and gpgga) and it sends the telemetry to the ground using the audio link of our video transmitter.
It is now in a very reliable form, and it has still a good development base.
With some work, we can increase the telemetry data to send to the ground base.
I publish the code here: http://code.google.com/p/opendiyantracker/
The project is open and I hope the RC community can embrace this and help to develop the code (what so far didn't happen, which made me sad with the lack of interest).
Comments
Terry,
The time that the winch servo use to invert rotation is very small, when we are conducting our model that 360 rotation is almost negligible, a majority of times its unnoticed in the video feed.
Check the video "360DegreesAroundBase_AlfaVersion Demo", did you notice the 360 servo rotation?
The white/grey cable is a usb cable, I had the arduino logging to a PC when I did the video.
in version 01e I already have an LCD that indicates the data download from the model.
This is quite an interesting idea.. simple and useful..
To follow-on from <jalves> comment - has the option of adding a second antenna and switching to it so that the rotation time back onto target is reduced significantly ? Also is the reason for the rotation in the first place simply to keep the cable free {in the video what signal does that free cable carry ?} or is to keep the azimuth calculations easy ?
ideally, the AT should maintain the direction (what it does now, but have to improve the solution implemented).
BUT if the video is fuzzy, you are in the limits of the video link then you should do a quick 180degrees turn and return to home following the same bearing you had thus hopefully recovering the tracking capability .
I think that this is great work. My only concern is that the tracker is essentially dependent on the same signal as the video feed. What happens when you drop video when you are a long way out with a high gain antenna?
New video of teh Alpha version in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5C7Hacw6K0