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Thirty Days (#23): New Product Preview

Posted by Joshua Ott on June 2, 2013 at 11:00pm

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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.
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Comments

  • R. D. Starwalt June 3, 2013 at 7:10am

    +1 on Follow Me box.

    -=Doug

  • Moderator
    Alex June 3, 2013 at 5:50am

    My guess is a follow me box as I think its a Ublox GPS and telem radio/ but with some sort of GCS as I dont see what else the RPI would be used for?  And where does battery go?

  • zmooth June 3, 2013 at 5:04am

    Looks cool! Must be able to act as a follow-me box, but what's the composite video for ?

    I don't see in-out so it can't be ground osd.

  • Stefan78 June 3, 2013 at 4:44am

    or a garage door opener ;-)

  • Stefan78 June 3, 2013 at 4:44am

    Follow me device

  • b nevins June 3, 2013 at 4:10am

    Tommy, I wasn't talking about the composite video connector.  The newer ones have a ribbon cable to hook a camera up to, but it looks like it is for a propriatary camera.

  • Euan Ramsay June 3, 2013 at 3:56am
    ...and a telemetry radio. So if not the groundstation itself, an antenna tracker/controller.
  • Euan Ramsay June 3, 2013 at 3:54am
    And that's a ublox, if I'm not mistaken. So mobile ground station definitely - maybe even specific to a function, eg: follow me.
  • Euan Ramsay June 3, 2013 at 3:52am
    It's a raspberry pi with a button programming interface. So I go with ground station too. What do I win? :-)
  • William Burkert June 3, 2013 at 3:51am

    An HD video camera with built in OSD?  I see video, audio, USB and RJ45.  When will you tell us what it is and when will it be available because I am not really sure what it is but I bet it is going to be very cool.

This reply was deleted.