I am ordering a pixhawk and will use it for a USV. I want to both manually control the boat with an RC transmitter, and also use my ground station to add waypoints so the boat can have an autonomous driving function.
Do I need to buy an RC receiver that I connect to the pixhawk for the RC transmitter to be able to communicate with the boat, and also buy a telemetry for both my laptop and the pixhawk?
So in total I need
1x transmitter,
1x receiver,
2x telemetry (1 for laptop and 1 for pixhawk), or how does this work?
What you describe is the most common and well-documented setup, works well and is probably the cheapest too.
You can get some telemetry over the RC link (such as yaapu) and there are systems that combine the RC and serial into a single radio (dragonlink, crossfire, and others) but I think these are either expensive or take some work to integrate and configure.
1x transmitter + 1x receiver and 2x telemetry, is the most common setup? I thought this would be an unnecessary expensive setup.
Edit:
Is it possible to connect both the laptop and the RC remote to the same reciever?
I am currently looking at the X8R combined with a Taranis X9 for manual control
And SIK radios for the ground station. Im not sure if it is necessary or how much interference there will be between the SIK radio and X8R
In my experience a RC Tx/Rx set plus a 3DR-SiK radio is very common and hard to beat on price. The RC is usually 2.4 GHz and the SiK is 433 or 915 MHz depending on your country so they don’t interfere much.
To combine the two functions into one unit seems to be a niche product. There are systems by Dragonlink, Crossfire TBS, SiYi FM30, RFD900 TXMOD, and probably more, I’m not an expert. In my searches for this you seem to either have to spend a lot of time with custom firmware and settings, or pay a lot of money for a ready-to-run solution.
I’d like a nice long-range all in one set but so far I’m using RC and SiK myself (aside from one project I did with mobile data for telemetry). Hope that helps! Maybe others will chime in with their experiences.