I’ve been wondering, what would be the easiest way to route telemetry and commands from APM to Internet. Using 3G modem, would provide almost unlimited range (I know there has been some discussions about this in DiyDrones forum. Here in Finland the GSM network is very covering, but due the way the cellular towers are optimized, maximum altitude where the connection works is probably less than 200 m.)
In theory, list of required hardware is not long. One just needs to receive messages from APM and encapsulate them to UDP packets and send via 3G modem and vice versa. Unfortunately handling PPP communications is too large task for simple microcontrollers. I ended up using BeagleBoard for the sake of easy development and since I had one at hand. I realize that BeagleBoard (which essentially is full computer by itself) is an overkill, but it’s not very heavy and fits easily inside Maja’s fuselage. Basically any embedded system, capable of running linux and acting as an usb host would do. Maybe in the future I figure out some additional tasks for BeagleBoard to do.
The setup works quite nice now. Unfortunately I haven't been able to do much flight testing. Weather constantly sucks this winter here in Finland. As you can see I already installed skis, but there's not even snow, even though it's almost new year.
I wrote more detailed post to my blog, with link to sources: http://antibore.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/routing-apm-communications-to-internet/
Comments
Have a look at http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/releasing-the-shackles-part-2-g.... This is what I am researching.. Needs a reasonably large airframe but it looks like it is ready to go out of the box
I was looking into this earlier in the year and couldn't find acceptably cheap hardware to try it out with back then, but one might get somewhere with a hackable USB modem like one of these: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.12057 (GPRS has coverage everywhere at least.) This one has serial port accessible like this: http://hackaday.com/2010/10/18/cheap-and-easy-sms-via-gsm-for-your-...
I was also looking for cell phones that had an easily exposed serial port, but none of the potential models could be found remaining in the market. The search continues, albeit in the back burner...
I'm looking into using a BeagleBoard for boosted wifi via High Speed Multimedia Radio. Under FCC part 97 rules here in the states you can amplify certain 802.11a and b/g channels up to 1500 watts. This requires a Ham license, but it seems worth the work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_multimedia_radio
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