ZOON is 2.4Ghz LoRa based long range telemetry module. ZOONv3 can send data up to 21km at 0.5kbps and 6km at 125kbps.
ZOON adds mavlink rssi packets to mavlink enabled data beside LED signal indicators.
Furthermore, " Mavlink NEVER LOST " also dynamically changes data speed and sends only necessary packets such as position,orientation,rtcm(rtk gps),etc. when the drone/robot is far away.
As ZOON uses LoRa chirp spread spectrum, It has strong immunity to reflection from obstacles and other wireless signals around.
Connection to ZOON can be with microUSB, JST - SM04B-GHS-TB, or ST - SM06B-GHS-TB.
It is also full-duplex . (Note also that it has half-duplex physical connection as similar to WiFi).
Hi it doesnt interfare with other radio signals because Lora use CRISP modulation which is different than any other radio signals. and also you can set the frequency to sub 2.4Ghz -2.5Ghz frequencies
I was informed by someone who has tested it with ArduPilot that when bidirectional communication starts, they will freez and must be rebooted. The range should be “phenomenal”
They didn’t work, even after updating the firmware. And now the project was stopped.
We have updated the firmware and also sent the instruction " how to update the firmware on zoon" please update the firmware. We have found the bug on UART driver and fixed.
Has anyone had luck with these v3 2.4ghz Zoon radios? We are trying to utilize a set with Mission Planner on a cube black, and it will not connect regardless of what configuraton settings we have set. It did connect one time, randomly and then would not connect again after that. Not sure what to do to get these working correctly over MP.
@Iron_Donkey no also with version 1 but there are other bad things:
the so called cloud configuration isn’t working anymore, at least form a week zoon.dronee.aero send back 502 error trough cloudflare.
the serial configuration seems not possible, I can connect by I have no response back / no menu and dronee website lacks information on how to use that way.
they don’t respond to mail.
I see that there is a user @Artem_Skorsky that seems to work for them it will be interesting to have some information from him.
My suggestion is to don’t waste time and money with anything from that company.
I was very curious about MAVLink over LoRa earlier this month and even bought a couple of modules for experimentation. I was encouraged by the mere existence of the Zoon module, though I admit I didn’t look closely at the product at the time (it appears to have been a failure). Their claim of full duplex communication with the weird parenthetical qualifier in the OP should’ve been a clue that there may have been a bit of snake oil sprinkled into the mix…
Through my own research and experimentation, I quickly discovered that LoRa is very ill-suited to MAVLink messaging. Some very simple math will show that even under ideal conditions at short range, LoRa bandwidth is insufficient for anything other than a very handicapped MAVLink connection. Any use of the truly great features of LoRa to increase the range further limits the bandwidth.
I had some pretty good success with ESP-Now, which is a 2.4GHz protocol developed by Espressif for their ESP8266 and ESP32 modules.
For a more robust solution, look toward SIK radios, RFD900 radios, DragonLink, etc.
Why you say Lora is not suited for Mavlink. ExPressLRS uses the same tech to do RC links.
I agree on packet size, Mavlink pkt is upto 300 bytes. while CRSF used by ExLRS is 64 bytes long.
I have build my prototype & tested it using Mission Planner(qgc) and ArduPilot. We achieved 70pkts/s data-rate. (70Hz). But most of Mavlink pkts transmitted are within 64 bytes, with occasional 255 byte pkts.
In my view a 50Hz pkt rate is very good for telemetry.
The Sik Telemetry can do atmost 64Kbps. Yes there could be bugs/issues in the firmware.
