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Yet another antenna tracker

Posted by Sami Finnila on June 28, 2011 at 8:30am

 

 

Now that I got a couple of weeks' vacation from the army I finally had the time to work on some new hardware. Last week I made directional antennas for my UAS: thanks to IBCrazy for his fabulous BiQuad tutorial on RCGroups. Only an antenna tracker was missing.

 

Paparazzi GCS includes an antenna tracker -controller but as I've recently been thinking about possibly moving to some other autopilot(s) I decided that I need a more universal antenna tracker: an "ArduTracker" in this case.

 

It's based around an Arduino Uno board and uses a DIY laser-cut pan/tilt -mechanism. Essentially the Arduino hijacks the GPS coordinates from the autopilot data stream so it's very easy to modify the source code to work with pretty much any autopilot system available.

 

The source code to the project and the CADs for the pan/tilt-mechanism are all open source if anyone's interested.

 

Hardware used:

  • Arduino Uno (+ optionally a proto shield)
  • 2x Futaba S3305 or similar servos
  • 2x 5*11*4mm or similar ball bearings
  • M5 bolts, nuts and washers.
  • CA glue
  • Two directional antennas
  • Bits and pieces...

 

EDIT: Here are the links for the CADs and the source code. For now the source code is only compatible with PPZ until more autopilots are added (this is very easy).

Tags: uav, antenna, arduino, paparazzi, tracker
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Comments

  • Alexander February 20, 2012 at 10:16am

    Sami Finnila, can you help me with adaptation your source code to Ardupilot with Xbee Telemetry ??

  • T3
    Sami Finnila June 29, 2011 at 10:39am

    Now that you deleted your earlier posts my answer got above your comment.

     

    Anyway, about those servos: pan and tilt servos both move only 180 degrees but that is enough to move the antenna around "360 degrees". It's all visible on the video: the tilt actually changes to the other side when the pan servo hits its limit and thus full hemisphere coverage is achieved.

  • Rana June 29, 2011 at 10:30am

    Its awsome ! Your approach of balancing the weight of the antenna is really great ! I would try to impliment that in my.

    You seem to have made the antennas yourself, if so, can you share ?

    How you are achieving 360deg of rotation with Futaba S3305, which is a standard servo of standard travel ?

     

  • T3
    Sami Finnila June 29, 2011 at 10:25am

    @Rana: The antennas are not of my design but rather that of Alex Greve aka. IBCrazy. He has a great tutorial about biquad antenna construction (11dBi and can be stacked to achieve higher gains) on RCGroups.

     

    I seriously recommend making your own biquad rather than using a regular patch antenna; the performance of IBCrazy's biquad is absolutely amazing.

  • T3
    Sami Finnila June 28, 2011 at 8:54pm
    @Diego: Yes, I was aware of that hence the quotation marks if you noticed, buddy. :-)
  • diego colonnello June 28, 2011 at 7:59pm
    hey buddy, good job, but the name ArduTracker is allready taken....... hehehehehe :-)
  • T3
    Sami Finnila June 28, 2011 at 1:55pm
    Yep, got the source code and the CADs ready for publishing -- links above. Still needs some programming, however, so that it will auto detect other autopilots besides PPZ.
  • Cre8it June 28, 2011 at 12:19pm
    Count me in!  Code and CAD me!!
  • ThomasB June 28, 2011 at 12:10pm
    Great project. Would like to see the sourcecode too :)
  • Azam Shahani June 28, 2011 at 10:40am

    I'm interested too. Ardutracker sounds like a fitting name.. where can we get the source code and the CAD files? Thanks for sharing this with us! 

     

This reply was deleted.