Original build log got locked due to inactivity. Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’, into the future…
Anyway, today is a VERY exciting milestone on this drone journey (it’s about the journey, not the destination… right?!).
First, a few definitions:
- flight controller: the ‘brain’ of a drone that handles high-urgency tasks like motor speed control, stabilization, object avoidance, navigation, etc. Most commonly based on some variant of the STM32 running a simple real-time OS.
- companion computer: a more powerful, higher latency, computer that handles resource-intensive tasks like image processing and storage. In my case I’m using a Pi Zero 2W. Nvidia Jetson is also common for more advanced drones.
- MAVLink: de-facto standard communications protocol to talk between drones, drone components, and control stations
The milestone: my pull request adding photo and video recording to Rpanion was merged into the upstream repo!! What that means (sorry, no fun photos this time):
- Anyone running Rpanion-server on a companion computer now has the ability to use any USB or CSI-connected camera.
- The camera is triggered via MAVLink commands from the companion computer, flight controller, or control station; no GPIO or serial connections are required betewen the camera and flight controller. This also makes it possible to trigger the camera from a button on the RC transmitter.
- Above bullet makes it possible for the flight controller to trigger the camera automatically during an autonomous mission - either at a time interval, or when specific waypoints are reached, etc.
- GPS coordinates are requested from the flight controller via MAVLink every time the camera is triggered, and (if available), added to the photo metadata to geotag the photos. Besides being fun, this also enables the images to be used to generate a point cloud or orthophoto using photogrammetry.
Something on my quad got messed up during transport the last time I took it out and now only 3 of 4 motors work, so… gotta fix that, then try out the above software!