[Pawel]

Hello, is there any interest in this project to track drones using the OGN network for gliders and small aircrafts ?
Adding a $3 RF module and a piece of software would make drones visible online .

Pawel.

[Mateusz]

Hi Paweł,

This indeed sounds really interesting, I think it's a great idea and very suitable for a long distance aircrafts.
Do you know if there are any commercially available transmitters ? How heavy it would be ?
Maybe aircrafts could be viewed in Android's LP2Go ?

/Mateusz

[Pawel]

Indeed, tracking over long range flight would be a great application !

A minimum setup would be connect RFM69HW module (very small and light) and do the rest in drone software.
For the connection you need one SPI and one or two GPIO lines.
At this time there are no comercially available boards, one could consider running OGN tracker on boards like Adafruit M0 or RF-Bee or some other which contain an RF module and a CPU.

[Mateusz]

How about this ? https://www.adafruit.com/product/3076

I dont know if Revo has spare SPI, maybe (it should). But this might be easier. There is already some code doing UAVTalk on Arduino so it should be possible.

[Pawel]

Yes, this is the module I was talking about just with the 32-bit CPU.
You only need to supply the GPS data and PPS.

[Pawel]

For the GPS in the LibrePilot drones: in which modes they usually work ? I mean NMEA or UBX ? One or more measurement per second ? Which baud rate ? Is PPS being used ? If I would program a module which passively attaches to GPS output and produce psition packets accordiong to the OGN format, this would be a very useful info. The module one could bricolage right now from "Blue Pill" and RFM69HW expects one measurement per second, NMEA output and the PPS signal. I suspect drones run GPS in 5Hz or possibly even 10Hz ? My plan is to make the software flexible enough so it can adapt to any GPS running in the drone. Here is a description of what could be used immediately: http://wiki.glidernet.org/ogn-tracker-diy