I’m thinking it’d be fun to use a laptop along with my Holybro SiK telemetry radios for my quad. I have an old laptop, can’t even remember what OS it’s running. I’m debating if it’d work ok as a GC or is there anything to be gained by getting a new laptop? If I go the new route, are there any features such as RAM or anything else that you’d recommend having?
The main thing you want to look for is a screen that’s as bright as possible. you can get laptops made for outdoors like toughbooks.
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MP uses about 400-500Mb of RAM according to a quick check of Task Manager in Windows 11. So it isn’t super RAM intensive, but it isn’t a lightweight, either.
You shouldn’t need anything too fancy. Recommend something that runs Windows 10/11 at any reasonable speed, and you should be ok. I’m not much of a GPU guru, but I don’t think you need anything special there, either.
Best course of action would be to install Windows on the old one and see what happens.
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The most important thing is the screen brightness. Something you can read. And when your outside you can change the Mission Planner theme to the bright screen and I found that helped a bit. Get the brightest screen you’re willing to pay for.
At that point the rest should fall into place. A good battery will help a lot. And also a good pointer/mouse/trackpad or device of choice. If you’re used to using a mouse on the desk, consider a mouse or something for the field as well because when you go back to the touch pad and try to zoom in on the map it can be frustrating on some laptops.
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Pretty much any i3, i5, i7, Ryzen will work great.
Avoid anything:
Intel Pentium, Atom, Core 2, Celeron
AMD Athlon, Turion, A8, A12,
those are low power and old cores and it will quickly slow down especially if you try and use video at the same time.
4gb RAM will work but I would recommend 8gb, you don’t want the laptop to grind to a halt if you open chrome.
Make sure it has a SSD instead of a hard drive you can buy them for under £20 now if it doesn’t .
Stick with windows 10, It’s much faster and responsive than 11 especially on older hardware.
Avoid anything using Windows RT, it’s incompatible as it uses an ARM CPU.
Make sure it has decent battery life, if you can’t get something made for outdoors like a toughbook, look at corporate laptops you can get high-end laptops made from metal with long battery life for really cheap, things like HP elitebooks, Dell lattitude, Apple Macbooks with intel CPUs
Thinkpads used to be good but the last new Lenovo ThinkPads I have got have been jokes, I won’t be getting another one.
Panasonic toughbooks are the standard for outdoor laptops, they have bright screens, they are waterproof, you see them everywhere, they are used a lot for servicing machinery in industry, automotive repair and military. they are really expensive to buy new almost 4k, but I have started to see early i5 models for under £150 on eBay, I’m going to get one soon.
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I’ve used and old Toshiba dual core machine with 2 GB memory and loaded a copy of Kubuntu 24.01 onto it. Have put a SSD into it to speed it up a bit and then installed Mission Planner onto it and it works fine. I’m using a Matek H743 wind controller and I get a good USB connection to it every time. Screen is OK inside but outside, make up a a screen shade protector to fit around to help.
I also have programmed up and ESP32 D1 MINI with DroneBridge on it connected to the H743 which gives me a WiFi link to the drone which allows a TPC connection to Mission Controller, hence no cables attached. Perfect for out on the field. Also have used my Lenovo tablet with MC on it. Connects up with the Wifi and has a brighter screen.
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