Fully Autonoumous Aerial repeater

Have flown a few simple missions with Arducopter 3.1 /PC based Mission Planner/ Telemtry …and I believe all this below is possible now…what I want to do is:

Using only my Nexus running DroidPlanner, go to the flying site…setup a single indefinite Loiter point at the site, along with takeoff and land,etc. and send it to the copter…then, without any RC TX involved…arm and initiate the mission…the copter takes off…flies to the indefinite Loiter point (preferably with a defined yaw angle with respect to north at the loiter point,but not really required) and stays there until the battery lowers to the battery failsafe point I set and then it RTLs,lands and disarms…

I will have the copter’s RX failsafe set to AUTO…and RTL final alt at zero…

can I do this with 1.2 Droidplanner?
with 2.0?

will ARMING from the Droidplanner initiate the mission since the copter is in RX failsafe (AUTO) or do I have to command it to AUTO?

The repeater part of your post caught my eye. I am doing exactly that for animal collars. I think the multicopter is a platform too far. I use a super sky surfer and a bixler and quite simple chuck them and then climb to altitude and flip into loiter. If I don’t do anything the platform will descend when the ESC cut off happens and it will land in the loiter radius somewhere. So if its a big field all is good. I don’t do that but could. I get 35 minutes out of a 2200 maH battery in the Bixler.

A multirotor probably will not give you the endurance you need.

I do flight follow with a tablet but use a conventional RC controller for the flying.

@hwurzburg I do not recommend that you fly only with the tablet for the moment. But if you wanna try, and you setup all the fail-safe correctly you should be able to do it. But please keep someone with the RC TX at hand, just in case, for the first flights.

@Gary It looks like you are doing some fun stuff :slight_smile:

If I do what I suggest, ie have the RX FS as AUTO and ARM via the Droidplanner, will it immediately start the mission (takeoff will be the first command in the WP list)? or do I have to do something else from the Droidplanner?

You may need to select it to go for the first waypoint, by using the waypoint spinner.

@GrayMortimer
I can get about 25minutes hovering at 200 feet with my APM quad setup (4s,5000mah on a F-450 Flamewheel)…I have another Flamewheel with a stabilized Tarot Gimbal, GP3, and a NAZA-M FC that gets about 17minutes…it has an LRS rc system and 1.3G video…while I can fly behind lots of trees far away with the LRS RC, the video, even at 1.3G gets iffy…normally, I have a wireless ground repeater that receives the 1.3G video and repeats it a 5.8G to my goggles…having this station in the air at 200 feet, instead of on the ground should allow me to low level “tree slalom” maybe up to a mile away…should get some great seamless videos!

fyi…here is a jaunt with the NAZA Flamewheel before I put the gimbal on…same weight as the Gopro case I removed, so endurance shouldn’t have changed…

youtu.be/nd_C4eMJ3wg

fyi…you must raise the throttle to start TAKEOFF…just ARMING a mission with it as the first command will not do it by itself… …

@hwurzburg

The arducopter developers are working on a new mission item that will alow the takeoff to happen without the RC tx.