I just ran across this this morning on Engadget, Wired online. It immediately struck me as almost a "holy grail" of tablets to use for a ground control station. It has plenty of buttons, and 2 joysticks. We already have the excellent Andropilot app. Now we have built in controls... Maybe we should pool some money to send one of these to Kevin Hester.
The only problem is the specs are a little lightweight:
- 7" 1024x600 display, no mention of brightness
- Android 4.1 Jellybean
- Arm Coretex A9 dual-core 1.6 GHz
- 8GB Flash, 1GB Ram, with a microSD card slot
The really good news is it's only $170. It's definitely worth experimenting with.
I'd kick in $20 to send one to Kevin Hester if he's interested in developing it for AndroPilot use. Anybody else?
Comments
@Doug - great idea wrt. how the left stick should work. I'll make that an option.
Glad to hear that this tablet is better than expected after the french reviews...
yeah - I think arthur's device (so tablet could be independently powered) + a tablet like this could be really sweet for folks that want >2hr flight time.
That's here one board that I'm developing is very handy. It's a 3DR radio <-> TCP, so using by using this and a wifi router you can access the Mavlink stream via WiFi.
Some more observations, I tried playing some games mapping the controls to the sticks, and overall they are OK. The short throw and stiffness makes them on/off but 360degrees so to speak.
But compared to flying an AR drone with Ipad onscreen controls, the gamepad physical sticks beat it by a long long ways, the sticks are much better than any virtual joystick.
And the thing comes with a way to map the joystick to any app that uses on-screen joysticks :).
So overall considering the price I think it would be a worthwhile platform to try as a GCS, but one thing I still need to dig up a cable for is using it as a usb host. It only has one port, and thus it cannot be charged if some slave device is plugged in to the port.
Sent my $20.
I figure, even if it sucks a little bit, but is useable, for $170... That's still a good deal on a controller and tablet.
Again, the intent is 100% FBW.
I wonder if an anti-glare film would help? Anybody used this?
http://www.nushield.com/
$20 sent to Kevin.
I took some pics, it's late afternoon and overcast but I put it down with the screen facing upwards and tried to get the glare on camera, which didn't work so well as the glare was quite faint, but as you can see below the screen is quite bright.
I think in direct sunlight without any shade it will be hard to see but that's about the same with every other LCD. With some kind of flip up screen shade it would work always I suppose.
I think the biggest 'downer' is the joysticks themselves, they are a bit too stiff and have short throw(~3mm center -> all the way out). But I think the ideas by others here regarding how to make it react with low max speed to inputs is probably going to make it quite useable.
Thanks Noth! I just saw your note. So sure, I'd be up for giving this a shot. If folks paypal for about $170 I'll fire off an order and post here to say stop sending money. ;-)
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