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Showing posts from June, 2021

Internet Weather Links

  Weather is kind of important for a solar RC airplane.   We don't want rain, or too much cloud, or too much wind.   So we will collect some links here, trying to move the best toward the top, for checking weather near us.   WindGuru Aguilla Seafeathers Bay - Can see how much cloud, rain prediction, wind speed and direction.  Windy.com East Anguilla - map showing wind at different date, time, altitude  Caribbean Radar Composite - Radar from all around the Caribbean.  Can see where it is really raining right now.  ANIMATION SATELLITE et RADAR de METEO FRANCE - Radar from satellites Tropical Weather, Hurricane Watches - major storms                

Switching from iNav to Ardupilot for Flight Controller

   We had been using iNav software for the flight controller but have decided to switch to Ardupilot the following reasons:    1) Ardupilot can have a "companion processor" like the Jetson Nano that does vision/AI and decides things like which way to go.   We really want to explore what can be done with AI on a solar powered airplane.   Like can it avoid clouds and stay in the sun more, can it scan the horizon with a telephoto camera looking for boats, can it head for a boat automatically, etc.   This seems fun.    2) Ardupilot can use a companion processor to communicate over cell data network (4G) to a ground station.  With this we could fly all around Anguilla and still have communication between the ground station and the airplane.  So from the ground we can change the mission plan during the flight.    We could decide to go to a particular boat, or decide to come home because the change of rain has gone up.   Or if we don't have AI avoiding clouds we could do it