Chad Amonn, one of our mechanical engineers, has been busy designing some new products. He created this package to hold electronics designed by: Craig Elder, Sam Kelley, Kevin Bretney, and Jeff Wurzbach.
Any ideas on what this thing does?
(Edit)
MAV Station is part of MAVelous
What is MAVelous?
MAVelous is a browser based Ground Control Station that John Wiseman, Pat Hickey, and now Kevin Hester have been working on. It is an alternative to Mission Planner or Droid Planner, QGC etc. In order for MAVelous to function you need a server that converts MAVlink messages into HTML. MAVStation is that server in a box. It is small enough you can easily carry it around and take to the field with you.
Basically you have a radio and MAVLink between the vehicle and the MAVStation, and Wi-Fi link between the MAVstation and a tablet.
Inside the MAVStation is a Raspberry Pi computer running the server, plus a rechargeable battery to power it. There is a Wi-Fi connection allowing you to connect to a tablet running a browser. You also get a GPS and a 3DR radio to connect to the vehicle. There is a charger that runs off of a USB connection or an external power supply and there are also servo outputs available to steer an antenna tracker.
But wait, there's more....By the time you have all of those elements in place, you only need to add a handful of additional buttons and you now have a box that can be used as a Follow Me device.
In the best of all worlds, the Follow Me device would be optimized and made smaller and easier to carry around, but this is a great development platform and a great place to start.
Comments
My vote is also for an RPi-based ground station, with camera pan and tilt control using the buttons!
Have you thought of getting also some RTK GPS data flowing from this (hypotetical) ground station to the onboard GPS? That alone would be a game changer in terms of position accuracy...!
@b nevins: The composite is a output and the SD card is the computers "harddisk".
APM V3, based on RbPI.
Raspberry Pi Ground station
Obviously it has a GPS and telemetry board in it, as well as a SD card for storing video I presume. What I'm curious about the buttons on it. I'm guessing for controling camera pan/tilt? It's been a while since I messed with one, but since the new ones have video input, it would be great to have a telemetry overlay added on the ground station side since you usually lose video feed before telemetry. This way if you are flying with goggles, you will still have something on your screen. I supposed if you have a keyboard/touch screen added to it, it would be useful for running mission planner, but it isn't really compact at that point any more.
I don't see output for antenna control on it either.
A hand-held cold fusion power generator + wireless monitoring? ;-)
Follow me ground station?
Definitelly a PI...
RasPi groundstation?
It's a Raspberry pi ! with telemetry and GPS ?
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