crossbow micronave ground station software

[Unterhausen]

We have been working with our Crossbow micronav for a while now. It's been low priority, and we didn't have any pilots, so we haven't flown at all. Now I'm a moderately proficient pilot, so I'd like to fly soon.

I need to perform further testing, but the ground station software that Crossbow provides seems lot lock up a lot. It just displays a black screen and doesn't update. I've written programs with MFC that did that under load, and I'm not sure what the solution is. My thought is to move to linux and away from MFC. The other idea I have is to go to native Windows graphics calls which have never given me problems.

I'm going to try the software on the laptop I am thinking about flying with, but I can't see having the ground station lock up in flight.

Is there open source ground station software out there? I'm not afraid of network programming, but starting from scratch seems a bit much.

[clolson]

We have been working with our Crossbow micronav for a while now. It's been low priority, and we didn't have any pilots, so we haven't flown at all. Now I'm a moderately proficient pilot, so I'd like to fly soon.

I need to perform further testing, but the ground station software that Crossbow provides seems lot lock up a lot. It just displays a black screen and doesn't update. I've written programs with MFC that did that under load, and I'm not sure what the solution is. My thought is to move to linux and away from MFC. The other idea I have is to go to native Windows graphics calls which have never given me problems.

I'm going to try the software on the laptop I am thinking about flying with, but I can't see having the ground station lock up in flight.

Is there open source ground station software out there? I'm not afraid of network programming, but starting from scratch seems a bit much.


I wasn't all that impressed with the crossbow ground station software either. We have a unav here at the U of MN and have been proceeding with it as a low priority item as well. Hopefully we'll get ours up in the air some time this fall.

Here are a couple ideas for you. On the stargate (if you are using it + their flight software) you have your location and ground track and ground speed. You could reformate this pretty easily into standard "nmea" strings and then send them to the ground over whatever mechanism you have in place (we have a radio modem here, I don't have too much confidence in the range of 802.11b wireless they used in their zagi.)

Once you have the NMEA strings, you can feed these into just about any moving map software (pc based or pda based) and track your flight with that. Another option would be to spit out AV400 sentences and plug into a real Garmin 196/295/296/III gps and track your flight that way.

Or you could pipe your real time flight data into FlightGear and have all those nmea/av400 output capabilities + a real time 3d view of your flight. Add in a network connection at the field and you could turn on FG's multiplayer feature and track your flight with our google maps hack (and fly with a few virtual friends):

http://mpmap02.flightgear.org/

Those were some of the directions I was thinking about here.

A network connection at the flying site is not trivial, but there are cell phone based solutions available. Some other guys I work with found a deal for $200 to buy the hardware + $60/month unlimited usage. (Note I'm not saying put the cell phone on the airplane, but attach it to the ground station so that can hook into the internet so you can run google maps and setup the FG multiplayer connection.)

There's too many fun ideas to try and not nearly enough time...

Curt.

[Unterhausen]

those are some nice ideas. I may just get rid of the MFC as a first step. I like the flightgear option, Crossbow is using someone else's "glass cockpit" in the most recent version of the code. Haven't gotten it to work though.

I'm hoping to get the wifi to work. Guess I'll just have to fly the plane manually and test the range. Wifi really slows down the stargate. I'm thinking about putting more than one computer on board, one for just the wifi. I have a stack of Gumstix and at least one extra Stargate, but no money for radios.

A guy I work with bought pre-paid cellphone/internet cards. He told me it was the cheapest and most predictable way to go. I don't have any money right now, gotta get a proposal or two funded.

Have you put the micronav in a plane yet? Ours goes hard over when you turn on the nav in the basement. I guess I have to go read through the code again, or maybe I'll just take the thing outdoors and see if it does the same thing once it has GPS lock.