Arduino Tracking Antenna Hardware & Software Revision
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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
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Microcontroller Pin Configuration
The microcontroller used in this pcb is seeeduino xiao nrf52840. It surprisingly has a on-board 6-axis IMU.
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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
Make sure your Arduino IDE supports
Seeed Xiao nRF52840
board. You can follow the instruction in this link to set it up.With the Mission Planner connected to the drone, for the tracking antenna to receive the droneโs GPS message, MAVLink message needs to be forwarded to the tracking antenna. It can be done by:
Ctrl + f
in Mission Planner. SelectMavLink
. Then choose the COM Port you wish to forward the message and the baudrate('57600') of transmission speed, selectwrite access
and hitconnect
to start forwarding. ORCtrl + f
in Mission Planner. SelectMavLink
. Then chooseUDP
Client, baudrate doesnโt matter here, the destination is the self-machine127.0.0.1
, then hitconnect
to start forwarding.
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Useful Resources:
Adafruit Bluefruit nrf52 libraries for BLE: Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino/libraries/Bluefruit52Lib at master ยท adafruit/Adafruit_nRF52_Arduino
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 & Bluetooth Usage | Seeed Studio Wiki & https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/index.jsp?topic=%2Fug_nrfconnect_ble%2FUG%2FnRF_Connect_BLE%2FnRF_Connect_intro.html & BLEConsole
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