Smart Radio GCS Reference Design: Software Configuration

Smart Radio GCS Reference Design: Software Configuration

Software Configuration

Drone-side Smart Radio

The Smart Radio starts a UDP server at port 2000 with a baud rate of 57600 by default. Therefore, if the settings are acceptable, then there is no need to configure the Smart Radio at all. Fig. 3 shows a screenshot of the Serial Port configuration menu which can be accessed by navigating to Services → Serial Configuration in the web GUI. By default, the Smart Radio’s firewall is open on port 2000, but if the port is changed, then a new firewall option needs to be defined.


Fig. 5 Serial Port Configuration Menu

Aside from the Serial configuration, you should adjust the traffic prioritization settings. Navigate to Network Configuration → Traffic Prioritization and make sure to use appropriate settings for the Voice Command & Control queue. If you are using the latest Mesh Rider firmware, then click Optimize Video Streaming. The radio will automatically identify high-bandwidth streams and route them to the Video queue. If the RSSI to a particular station is less than the “Video bad link threshold (dBm)”, then the radio will drop a percentage of video packets going to that station defined by “Video bad link drop (percentage)”.



GCS-Side Smart Radio

For the GCS-side Smart Radio, we will use a Wearable Smart Radio which includes an integrated WiFi radio. The integrated WiFi radio starts an AP with SSID “DoodleLabsWiFi” and password “DoodleSmartRadio”. As soon as the GCS-Side and Drone-side Smart Radios are powered, they should connect to one another. You should also configure the Traffic Prioritization settings in the same way that you did on the Drone-side Radio.

GCS

For this reference design, we will be using QGroundControl. We used a Samsung Galaxy Tab A[CM1]  for this reference design. Before starting QGroundControl, connect to the WiFi AP of the Smart Radio. You will need to use a static IP address for the GCS in the 10.223.0.0/16 subnet. An example configuration is shown in Fig. 7.

I know on my Samsung phone it is actually a bit tricky to get to the setting for setting a static IP, if you were not given a DHCP address. The connection simply fails becuase theres no IP. We should maybe include this bit of android/samsung errata. [CM1]

 

To set static IP on a new network that does not have DHCP,  I have to first connect to the hotspot. Then it will fail and say unable to get IP address. Then you find the entry in the wifi menu. Then tap and hold on the entry. A contextual menu will pop-up with a few option. Select the option for modify network. Then you will see the dialog presented in the screenshot below.


Fig. 7 GCS WiFi Configuration

Once you are connected to the Smart Radio, you should be able to ping any node on the network. Open QGroundControl and navigate to the Application Settings menu. In Fig. 6, we used the RTSP URL of our UAV.

When using Android as a GCS be aware that changing application windows can cause QGruondControl to disconnect.




Fig. 8 QGroundControl Application Settings

Create a new connection to connect to the Socat UDP server on the UAV. The listening port is unimportant.



 

Fig. 9 QGroundControl Comm Links

After that, open up the Comm Links tab. At this point, navigate back to the main screen. QGroundControl will connect to the UAV.


 

 

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