Open Ground Station Protokoll

[amir]

Hi Tom & the rest of the gluon pilots!

Congratulations to your Release!

For those who do not know me, I'm one of the head developers of the UAVP-NG Project.
I'm also an interested reader of Tom's blog for a long while now.

I just listened to Tom's interesting podcast about the GluonPilot where he proposed an open standard for a ground station protocol. I think that's a great idea.

I had to smile, when Tom described the problems of finding common ground for such a protocol... Even trough it will be not easy to design such a protocol in a way so that everybody is happy with it, I think it's a great idea to try!

On the NG we implement new protocols as new shell commands. A NG shell command is able to take over it's "controlling tty" and so can take control of the UART over which the command has been sent. This allows us to implement new protocols as simple as implementing a new shell command while keeping all other protocols (implemented in different shell commands) intact. The only shortcoming of this is that a client application needs to send a shell command first, before starting the chosen protocol. This means we can have as many protocols side by side as we wish, which will simplify implementation of a new protocol.

So if there's interest from your side as well to build a common protocol for ground station communication, we would be interested too.

We already implemented 2 different ground station protocols (one of them is considered legacy now) but both were not very sophisticated and were just hacked on the fly to get something working.

So a exquisite ground station protocol is still on our wishlist too...

Best regards & keep up the great work!
- Amir

[pedro.assuncao]

Tom,

Has there been any progress on the common protocol idea?
I suspect the only way forward has to be a protocol with two different implementations, binary and non binary .
I would suggest we should start to create a feature list for the GSP(Ground Station Protocol) and GSC(Ground Station Console), Tom do you agree?

[pedro.assuncao]

Ok, i did a quick (and incomplete) list of the features I would like to be supported by the protocol
so here it goes

Health & Usage Data

• AHRS Sensor Raw & Filtered Data
• Battery Voltage readings
• Temperature Sensors readings
• Servos positions

Mission

• Total Flight Time
• List Waypoints
• Next waypoint and previous waypoint
• Current position
• Add new WayPoint
• Set next waypoint
• Delete waypoint
• Abort mission/Return Home

[lukasz]

Hi Guys,

Any work or progress on Ground station for Gluonpilot?

[Tom]

Hi Lukasz,

Right now stabilization works great. Next weekend I will start implementing nagivation. Once the basics of that work, I can start developing a groundstation!

It appears as if my first versions will use an ASCII-based protocol

Tom

[lukasz]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for update.
What hardware will you be using to implement this communication?

[Tom]

The prototype board I have now is an XBee-Pro mounted on a small PCB with a switched voltage regulator (can also be used then to power the gluon module).

The XBee-Pro development kit is a really interesting deal (I bought it for 99€).

Tom

[lukasz]

Could you point me to a web site that you purchased XBee development Kit?
I have checked out couple of sites offering this module but they seem to be quite expensive (179 - 199 Euro)

[Tom]

This is the one I bought (XBee-pro 868MHz) : http://www.digi.com/products/model.jsp? ... =3193&pm=Y

I must admit that it was only 99$ back then, not it is 149$. The quality is good, range extremely good (300+ mW -> over 10km). Unfortunately I had to reduce the output power (in software) to 10mW because otherwise it was disturbing my RC-receiver (only 5-10cm distance between in my small funjet). Range is still very good at that power level.

[lukasz]

Thanks Tom for sharing link.

I will try to look if there are any distributors on Polish market - I might find it cheaper or I will wait for any promotions