[OpenRelief Developer] Raspberry Pi to APM2 Communication - Producer-Server-Consumer Model

[George Harkin]

Hello Everyone,
Just joined up to the group today, but I've been working on a similar
platform to yours for the last few months on my own.
Currently I've got an APM2 set up with an FPVRaptor.  It has been a great
process getting everything up and running with it, and I'm now confident
that it is stable enough to start development with.  It is also set up with
FPV, but that might just be for fun ;)
I've also just received my Raspberry PI, which I felt would be a great
small form factor PC to utilize for both onboard image processing and as a
publisher to communicate current telemetry and status up to a central
server.
To that end, I've acquired a U600 USB GSM modem for data link, and will be
setting up the UART port on the RaspberryPi to communicate the Mavlink data
stream to a server central server.  I hope to then either adapt the
ArduPilot Mission Planner to read data streams from that server and issue
mission commands back to the Drone.
If you'd like to help work on this project above, send me a note.  If you
think the above project is in the wrong direction, let me know in this
thread and we can redirect my effort where it is needed.
I'll be writing everything in Python, where possible, as it is the cleanest
and easiest for people to pick up on.
A side project, I'm also working with python-opencv to get a downward
facing infrared camera running with some human recognition algorithms.  I
think this would be _very_ useful in both search and rescue operations, or
simple affected persons counts.
I've specked out small form factor infrared cameras, and the lowest I could
find was in the $2000 to $3000 range ( see
http://www.drs.com/products/RSTA/Tamarisk.aspx ).  If you know of a lower
cost small form factor infrared camera, please let me know.  I might be
able to talk to drs and see if they would be willing to chip in a
development camera in prospect of future sales.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://openrelief.org/pipermail/developer_openrelief.org/attachments/20120612/eab32abf/attachment.html>