memory only (Figure 6). This view does not give us a nice
satellite picture of the flight area, but hopefully the next
version of the GCS will be out soon.
Once everything is up and running, you’ll see the
quad’s position on the map, along with the normal
information on the panel such as altitude, attitude, etc. The
last step is to mount the GPS on the quad. This could be
done with some double-stick tape, but it would take a
decent amount of our deck space. The kit came with a
handy little bracket to mount the GPS slightly elevated from
the deck. This just screws together with one screw through
the mast. I drilled two holes in the deck next to the flight
controller and mounted it with 2-56 hardware. Be sure the
cable will reach the GPS before you drill!
I also oriented the forward arrow on the GPS to the
vehicle forward direction. Eventually, we will want to use
the magnetometer inside the GPS unit (more on that later),
so a bit of glue to keep it from rotating in flight is a good
idea. With that, our quad is looking a little Frankenstein-like,
but it knows where it is. It would be nice if we could see
this during the entire flight without being tethered, right?
That’s the next step!
OP-Link Radio Setup
The OP-Link transceivers give the quad the capability to
transmit telemetry to the GCS, and receive commands and
flight plans with no need to be physically connected. The
telemetry data can even be stored, which is great for a data
nerd like me that enjoys fishing around in data to
characterize system performance or extract some kind of
useful derived parameter. The radios are a relatively
standard 433 MHz link system. The Revolution flight
controller has the transceiver built in, but we need a
ground side radio. One was included with the package I
found on eBay (Figure 7). To get the ground side and air
side radios to work together, we need to bind them.
Before attempting to do any of the following,
attach the antenna for both radios using the
included cable. If you activate the radio on the
units without an antenna attached, damage will
result. When playing around in the settings awhile
back, I had activated the flight controller radio
and did indeed damage it. While it’s likely a pretty
simple fix, I had the new flight controller from the
package deal, so I just swapped it out and re-did
the setup we talked about back in the August
Figure 6. Changing the map from “Google Sat” to “Memory
Only” will make the map render properly until the Google
Maps downloader fix is released on the main branch of the
software.
Figure 8. The settings page for the groundside
radio. The Coordinator box should be ticked, the
power should be turned up to 100, and the device
ID should be recorded.
Figure 7. The ground side radio is a small USB pack that
connects to the telemetry transceiver on the flight
controller. Be careful to not strain the micro USB
connector. Velcro™ is a handy way to affix the transceiver
to your computer.
34 SERVO 09.2016
