Arduino Tracking Antenna Hardware & Software Revision

Owned by Hardy Yu
Last updated: 2024-05-06
2 min read

 

AAT PCB

AAT, auto antenna tracker, is the industry abbreviation to this type of antenna tower that is able to track the position of the UVA automatically. @Nathan Green made a custom PCB for the tracking antenna, therefore the software is supposed to be compatible with hardware setup

 

KiCAD Files

 

PDFs

 

Microcontroller Pin Configuration

The microcontroller used in this pcb is seeeduino xiao nrf52840. It surprisingly has a on-board 6-axis IMU.

 

image-20240430-215105.png
Seeduino Pinout Reference

Pin

Use

Pin

Use

A0

GPS RX

A1

GPS TX

A2

Pitch Servo

A3

Yaw Servo

A4

GPS 3D Fix

A5

Unused

A6

PCB USB Serial TX

A7

PCB USB Serial RX

A8

Unused

A9

Unused

A10

LED Light

Testing Setup

  1. Make sure your Arduino IDE supports Seeed Xiao nRF52840 board. You can follow the instruction in this link to set it up.

  2. With the Mission Planner connected to the drone, for the tracking antenna to receive the drone’s GPS message, MAVLink message needs to be forwarded to the tracking antenna. It can be done by:

    1. Ctrl + f in Mission Planner. Select MavLink. Then choose the COM Port you wish to forward the message and the baudrate('57600') of transmission speed, select write accessand hit connect to start forwarding. OR

    2. Ctrl + f in Mission Planner. Select MavLink. Then choose UDP Client, baudrate doesn’t matter here, the destination is the self-machine 127.0.0.1, then hit connect to start forwarding.

 

Useful Resources:

Adafruit Bluefruit nrf52 libraries for BLE: https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/tree/master/libraries/Bluefruit52Lib

BLE Walkthrough: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-BLE-Sense-Bluetooth_Usage/ & https://community.element14.com/technologies/internet-of-things/b/blog/posts/seeed-xiao-ble-sense-nrf52840 & https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/XIAO_ESP32C3_Bluetooth_Usage/ & &