Airplane-Mapping for ANR and Precision Flying

Precision flying is a sport that has existed for many years but so far it has been a sport for the participants as you go off with your airplane and you return after 1 hour or more and nobody other than the pilot knows where they've been. A recent development of this sport is the newly formed derivative ANR - Air Navigation Race where the competitors are tracked in real-time for the spectators to watch their progression.

My project is to develop an improved tracking device for these type of competitions using the capabilities of the Raspberry Pi Zero W Kit + Hologram Nova Cellular USB Modem to have a secure channel for collecting each aeroplanes GPS position to one or more sites where the position of each airplane will be displayed in real-time.

After reading Google's usage conditions, I decided I can not use Google Maps for this type of presentation. I looked at QGIS and it works to display one airplane but I will need to rewrite that part of QGIS to be able to have simultaneous presentation of up to 4 airplanes. I decided to do this project for only one airplane and attack QGIS later.

How I did it:

On my PC

Installed QGIS2.18.14 "Las Palmas" on my PC: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/doc/INSTALL.html

On my Raspberry PI Nano W:

The UART port, by default, is used for logins. We need to free it for the GPS.

Edit the file /boot/cmdline.txt and change:

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

to

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait

After that, change the /etc/inittab file and comment a line so it does not spawn a login console.

Comment the following line (it should be the last one):

#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
0

After these changes, reboot the Pi:

sudo reboot

After the reboot, install the GPS applications:

sudo apt-get install gpsd gpsd-clients

Execute gpsd (the GPS daemon):

sudo gpsd /dev/serial0 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

Now, let’s try the GPS (place it outside so it can work better):

cgps -s

And after a few seconds you should get some signal. I found this video helpful.

Walkthrough: Connecting a Bluetooth GPS to the Raspberry Pi Zero W

This webpage helped to get the Bluetooth connection working: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/51379/rfcomm-channel-cleaning

systemctl status bluetooth
hcitool scan
bluetoothctl
agent NoInputNoOutput
default-agent
scan on
pair 00:0A:xx:xx:xx:xx
paired-devices
quit    // exit bluetooth controller
rfcomm
sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm1 00:0A:xx:xx:xx:xx
sudo gpsd /dev/rfcomm1 -F /var/run/gpsd.sock

A small Python script forwards the GPS coordinates to the Hologram dashboard where they are routed to a Raspberry Pi 3 as I am more familiar with programming on the Raspberry than on the PC.

Routing in Hologram dashboard

I use a simple route.

Message received in Hologram dashboard:

{"success":true,"data":{"id":4752002,"logged":"2018-01-22 13:44:15.248015","orgid":10870,"deviceid":158230,"record_id":"5605c53a-ff7a-11e7-bd8e-bc764e200321","device_metadata":"{}","data":"{\"received\": \"2018-01-22T13:44:14+00:00\", \"authtype\": \"deviceid\", \"tags\": [\"ErlingGps\", \"_RESTAPI_\", \"_DEVICE_158230_\"], \"device_name\": \"ErlingsFlyg (80475)\", \"source\": 158230, \"record_id\": \"5605c53a-ff7a-11e7-bd8e-bc764e200321\", \"data\": \"JEdQR0dBLDEzNDA0OC4wMDAsNTkyMy4zMDAxLE4sMDE3NTMuNTI2MCxFLDEsMDcsMS4zLDYuOSxNLDIzLjUsTSwsMDAwMCo1Ng==\", \"device_id\": 158230}","matched_rules":[],"tags":["_DEVICE_158230_","_RESTAPI_","ErlingGps"]}}

On the Raspberry Pi 3

A java program to receive the message from Hologram dashboard and transfer it to a network port in the local network has not been implemented, because my ISP does not allow connections from the outside, so I have not been able to test this part of the project.

On a PC

Install QGIS and a map for the area and activate live GPS tracking. Now the GPS position is displayed on the map.