Here's a good Instructable on using the Plotly web service and Arduino to do basic quadcopter control and data analysis.
This project is part of a larger project involving the creation of a quadcopter. In this part of the project we want to collect the information of the sensor system that will be sent to the final user. The main controller of the quadcopter is based on an Arduino single-board microcontroller and the best way to send data via Internet is a WiFi shield. In this example, due to the lack of a WiFi shield, we opted for an Ethernet shield, although the code with both shields is not much different and can be easily adapted to a WiFi shield.
The materials used in this example are:
- Arduino UNO (you can use any Arduino)
- WIFI shield, or in our case an Ethernet shield, to connect with the Plotly web service. Additionally, these boards often incorporate a system to use a SD storage card, which allows us
Shield WIFI, or, in our case Ethernet shield, to connect with the Plotly web service; in addition, these boards often incorporate a system to use SD card storage, which allows us to store sensor data when we have no access to a WiFi or Ethernet network.
Sensors. Any sensor we want to obtain information either with direct connection to the arduino or with an intermediate conditioning. In our case we use the GY-80 IMU, affordable and with good results.
In the case you use an Ethernet shield you will need an Ethernet wire.
At least, you need power the Arduino, with batteries or USB wire.
Read the rest here.
Comments
Fun instructables. I have uses a similar service (COSM) with a arduino WiFi shield to do remote electronic voting...
I still wonder what the use case would be to stream your quad's sensors data to a web site but who knows what eventual useful application could emerge in the future.
having the plots online makes a lot of business sense in the long term:
Back in the day, Orbital offered online telemetry streaming of specific data items during launches to customers as a way to evaluate quality of launch and accuracy of meeting the launch/sat deployment targets. That was a cool way to measure delivery performance and the customers accepted it as a metric for payment e.g. miss the target by 10%, get a discount of 1%. and not just 'the payload's working/RF data.... Aside from online debugging makes for a great way to eval mission performance.
What was bad was it was streamed over http:// in the clear (I know, I wrote it).... luckily that was back in 1998. At least plot.ly has a key-based API and much high speed internet connection!
nice find.
Maybe not fancy but also something worth to mention is the free https://sites.google.com/site/terminalbpp/ .