3D Robotics

Using LoRa radios for long-range RC

3689730555?profile=original

This one is a bit of a dangerous hack, since LoRa is not as reliable as regular RC, but if you've got an autopilot handling regular drone control, using LoRa to send commands might make sense. 

From Hackaday:

LoRa has been making quite a stir in hacker circles over the past couple of years, as it offers a fascinating combination of long range, low power, and low cost. It does this by using spread spectrum techniques on unlicensed frequency bands, meaning it can send data a surprising distance and that you don’t need a radio license to use it. It is mainly used for Internet of Things things, but [Paweł Spychalski] has other ideas: he’s building a system to use it to control a quadcopter drone over distances of 5 kilometers or more. That’s an ambitious aim, considering that the parts he is using cost only a few bucks.

He’s using an off-brand Adafruit Feather LoRa board and a couple of home-made antennas with his own software that takes the data from the Taranis control port of the RC controller, encodes it and chirps it out over the LoRa radio. At the other end, a similar radio receives and decodes the data, feeding it out to the drone.

This is definitely still a work in progress, but he has got it working, flying his drone over the link, keeping control of it out to several hundred meters. At the moment, he can’t go much further as it seems that his LoRa radio is being overwhelmed by the video link on the drone, but he is working on changing the frequency spread & hopping and using a better antenna to provide longer range. We’ve seen some interesting stuff from [Pawel] before, like his DIY telemetry system, so this project is worth keeping an eye on if you are a drone fan.

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • it is good as a back up radio. It can give you telemetry data and as mentioned you send send commands
  • 不懂帮顶

  • About time something happened in the radio space, but if you need to know the bandwidth, you can't use it.  The general idea is longer range = lower bandwidth.  Still interesting to have a standard which allows consumers to push the physical limits of how far away the state of an atom can be changed.  

  • 100KM

    Interesting! Dragon link and team black sheep crossfire uses lora, easy 50km fast update. I'm sure a 50km opensource link is very possible. 

This reply was deleted.