Hi,
I thought I’d share my latest antennatracker build with you.
I needed a tracker to extend the wifi range for my rovers. I tried all tracker projects I could find, u360gts, Ardupilot antennatracker, anttracker, MissionPlanner tracking, but all did not work at some point.
U360gts did receive telemetry, but never showed a home position, anttracker did not register button presses and Ardupilot antennatracker did work fine with SITL, but behaved completly random outside. Missionplanner tracking requires a laptop.
I then remembered a mavproxy module, that outputs bearings to manually point an antenna. I took this module, added output to a Pololu Maestro servo board to it and now I have a panning only tracker (I do not need tilting for rovers), that covers 360 degrees with a GWS 125 1T sailwinch servo. All I have to do is to point the antennas south after powering it up and tell mavproxy where it is and it starts tracking.
No unreliable compass sensors, PID tuning, etc. All I had to do is to adjust the endpoints, because the servo does a little bit more than 360 degress with 1000-2000us.
Mavproxy (or python) did also change.
It used to take up 100% CPU on a RPi 3 and now it runs at 30% on a RPi 2.
The Rpi is also running Rpanion server, so I can easily setup/alter the network settings. There are two wifi adapters connected to the RPi. One connects to my smartphone hotspot and the other is configured as an accesspoint and has directional antennas connected to it. All devices (rovers, tablet, laptop) connect to the tracker accesspoint and share the smartphone internet connection.