Mission Panner over WiFi

Hardware Companion Computers
1

Hello, I want to set my rover up to operate over the wifi network in a mine so that I can control it anywhere from the control room. I have spent the day researching options, but have yet to find a good tutorial or guide on how to do it.

The Ardupilot documentation talks about aspsync and mavproxy but these rely on the wifi from teh companion computer. I want to plug an access point into the RPi and connect to the flight controller as well as to run video (ideally from an IP camera).

Does anyone know of a good solution which is well documented?

2

The Wifi on the RPi can be configured to be an Access Point. Both APSync and Rpanion-server can do this for you.

3

Thanks for that, but that is not what I need.

I have the access point that is configured to the mine’s wifi network. It is much more powerful than the RPi access point and allows for external aerials.

What I need is essentially to set up a cat5 wired connection between mission planner and the RPi on the rover. The actual wifi link will be transparent.

4

So:
Flight Controller -> RPi -> Ethernet -> AP -> Wifi?

5

Essentially, Yes…

Pixhawk >> RPi >> Ethernet >> Mesh Node >> Mine Wifi Mesh backbone>>Mesh Node >> Ethernet >> Laptop

So, the issue is that I will need to configure all IP addresses to be within the IP range of that network. 10.x.x.x

Thanks

6

Hi,

it depends on how the mesh node on the rover handles the network connection. If it acts like a transparent client bridge, it should just passthrough the connection to the RPi. The RPi then gets a valid IP address from the DHCP server on your existing network.

7

Yep, but my question is how I get APSync to communicate through the ethernet connection, not the wireless one.

8

APSync will stream over all available networks on the Pi.
You may need to edit the Pi’s network settings after installing the APSync image. You can do this by SSH’ing into the Pi and using nmcli to configure your network settings.

9

Thanks.

I got APSync working, but could not get teh network manager thing happening to change to the hardwired ethernet connection.

At the end of the day, I reverted to mission planner with an IP connection and it sorta does the job.