=== Let's Drone Out — Episode 417 ===
Title: LDO 417 - With Special Guest MUSTARDTIGER Of Formation Flight
Recorded: 2023-08-24
Hosts: Stephen "Belrik" Howell, Andrew "Frank" Hyams, Wayne "CurryKitten" Andrews, Jack "Brightontillifly" Nash
Guest(s): MustardTiger
Total audience: 1,189
Platforms: YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVXbDC6QsG8); SoundCloud (http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/1601172114-letsdroneout-ldo-417-with-special-guest-mustardtiger-of-formation-flight.mp3)
=====================================

Check out Formation Flight online:
https://formationflight.org
https://github.com/FormationFlight/FormationFlight
https://formationflight.org/getting-started/
https://discord.com/invite/s6vEaN3Ucj
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xsQPJ3lDsE

#LetsDroneOut #FormationFlight #FPV #Drone #Telemetry #ELRS #ExpressLRS

[0.0] Jack: Hello, and you're listening to Let's Drone Out, a special thank you to our lovely patrons
[6.28] Jack: that help donate so that we can pay the editor to remove the swear words and silly things
[11.36] Jack: we say.
[13.0] Jack: Massive thank you to…
[14.4] Jack: Carlos Campos!
[16.2] Jack: Art Faulkner!
[17.84] Jack: Sam Dahmer!
[19.68] Stephen: On with the show!
[20.68] MustardTiger: Now on the tree we cover.
[21.68] MustardTiger: Let's Drone Out now.
[52.12] Stephen: Hello, and welcome to Let's Drone Out with our special guest Mustard Tiger.
[58.32] Stephen: Tonight we're going to be talking about Formation Flight, but before all that we are joined
[63.48] Stephen: by Commander-in-Chief Frank.
[66.92] Stephen: Good evening, hello!
[68.8] Stephen: Everyone's favourite, Curry Kitten.
[70.96] Stephen: Hello!
[72.24] Stephen: And our special guest, that way, Mustard Tiger.
[75.68] Stephen: Hello!
[77.32] Stephen: Also myself, Stephen Bellrick, bringing you a very interesting project this evening, Formation
[83.36] Stephen: Flight.
[85.36] Stephen: Could you give us the rundown on Formation Flight, maybe the where and the why, and just
[91.12] Stephen: kind of explain how you came about, the idea, and what you wanted to do with it?
[96.52] MustardTiger: Absolutely, yeah.
[98.44] MustardTiger: So Formation Flight, the kind of headline description, what it is.
[102.92] MustardTiger: It's open source inter-UAS positioning and telemetry for FPV.
[106.88] MustardTiger: It's a whole lot of words.
[109.24] MustardTiger: If you've heard previously of the project, which went by a few names, iNav Radar, ESP32,
[115.56] MustardTiger: iNav Radar, some variation of that.
[118.76] MustardTiger: There were a couple of authors of that, Olivia C. being one of the main ones.
[123.36] MustardTiger: This is sort of the spiritual successor to that project.
[127.16] MustardTiger: So the general goal of this is, if you're flying as a group, if you're flying with
[132.32] MustardTiger: anything you want to keep track of the position of, you have a small beacon device, which
[137.4] MustardTiger: goes in every aircraft and shares position with other aircraft that are flying nearby
[142.12] MustardTiger: you.
[143.12] MustardTiger: The reason I came to developing this in any way, I always wanted to use iNav Radar.
[150.84] MustardTiger: I do a lot of formation flying with some friends locally out here in the Pacific Northwest.
[156.24] MustardTiger: And it's really easy to lose each other when you're doing Formation Flights, especially
[159.32] MustardTiger: analog, especially any degree of long range.
[162.44] MustardTiger: It's easy to lose each other.
[164.68] MustardTiger: When you do lose each other and you've got the perfect sunset, the perfect spot, everything
[169.04] MustardTiger: is perfect, but you can't find each other to get that nice Formation Flight shot.
[173.04] MustardTiger: That's frustrating.
[174.04] MustardTiger: So I looked into iNav Radar.
[177.16] MustardTiger: I had some of the hardware for it, some of the dev boards, but they seemed pretty heavy.
[182.24] MustardTiger: And I'm also an R2 pilot user for my fixed wing stuff.
[184.84] MustardTiger: So that was out the window for me off the hop.
[188.76] MustardTiger: The first thing I did was made some light changes to the original iNav Radar project.
[194.48] MustardTiger: So that it would function on Express LRS 900 megahertz hardware.
[199.44] MustardTiger: That is significantly smaller, lighter, cheaper, and I already had it lying around.
[203.88] MustardTiger: So that was perfect.
[205.84] MustardTiger: The next thing I did was ported the OSD part from iNav into R2Pilot, so that I could use
[212.04] MustardTiger: it with my R2Pilot aircraft, and then flew a couple of test flights with it.
[215.36] MustardTiger: It worked great.
[218.16] MustardTiger: And I decided, you know, there's a few little tweaks I'd like to make to this.
[222.28] MustardTiger: And maybe I can upstream it into iNav Radar.
[225.76] MustardTiger: And as I started making more and more and more and more changes, it just kind of grew
[229.6] MustardTiger: and grew and grew and grew, and eventually I took a look at the code, and it's like less
[235.12] MustardTiger: than 2% of iNav Radar's original code still lives on.
[239.56] MustardTiger: And most of it is vestigial, and I should probably clean it out.
[243.18] MustardTiger: So at this point, I broke off the fork on GitHub, called it its own project.
[249.28] MustardTiger: And now there's two distinct projects.
[251.96] MustardTiger: If you still want to run the original iNav Radar, it still exists.
[255.84] MustardTiger: But Formation Flight is the spiritual successor, does all the same things, and hopefully does
[260.48] MustardTiger: them cheaper, smaller, faster, all the nice things that I would hope to achieve.
[265.52] Frank: So is that the difference then between Formation Flight and iNav Radar, it's the hardware
[270.16] Frank: that it needs to work?
[271.96] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[272.96] MustardTiger: So hardware is the initial thing, right?
[275.28] MustardTiger: iNav Radar runs on the sort of ESP32, LoRa dev boards you can get your hands on.
[280.24] MustardTiger: They're about 30, 45 US dollars, somewhere in that range from Aliexpress and the like.
[285.92] MustardTiger: They weigh a good bit.
[287.84] MustardTiger: They can be 50, 60 grams, and they're pretty large.
[291.6] MustardTiger: They've built in OLEDs, all sorts of things that, frankly, aren't really necessary for
[297.12] MustardTiger: the project.
[298.12] MustardTiger: So yeah, the first thing I did with Formation Flight was to add additional hardware, a significant
[303.4] MustardTiger: amount.
[304.4] MustardTiger: I then went on, and in the process of all the many rewrites, I added support for the
[309.76] MustardTiger: 2.4 gigahertz band, which means you can use the very small 2.4 gigahertz Express LRS receivers.
[316.2] MustardTiger: And then sort of the main changes, the main reasons why somebody who currently uses iNav
[320.56] MustardTiger: Radar might want to move to Formation Flight.
[323.2] MustardTiger: It updates 10 times as fast.
[325.16] MustardTiger: It supports six people in the air instead of four.
[328.44] MustardTiger: It can use 2.4 gig, 900, and 433, as well as 868, of course.
[335.08] MustardTiger: It has a very nice web UI for configuration and display of information as compared to
[341.24] MustardTiger: the Bluetooth serial console that the original iNav Radar used.
[345.88] MustardTiger: Altogether, my goal with it was, as I said before, cheaper, better, faster.
[352.04] MustardTiger: All around, it should be something now.
[354.04] MustardTiger: You can install it in sub-250G aircraft very easily.
[358.68] MustardTiger: Because it updates faster, the tracking is much tighter.
[361.18] MustardTiger: It's much easier to find people.
[362.64] MustardTiger: All that.
[364.04] Frank: That has a lot of features.
[368.44] Curry: So I saw when I had a quick look through the website that it already works with iNav and
[374.76] Curry: RduPilot, and you've written your own fork for beta flight until that's in the code.
[379.32] Curry: Have we got some screenshots of exactly what you would see as a pilot?
[382.92] Curry: Obviously, you've got your SD, and basically, if I saw it right, you've got a little thing
[387.32] Curry: saying, pilot B is this direction, or does it give height or distance, or what does it give?
[396.84] MustardTiger: Yeah, so I'm sending some links.
[399.24] MustardTiger: Those are some links that describe it well.
[401.32] MustardTiger: To be clear, the RduPilot changes are not yet upstreamed.
[406.6] MustardTiger: I've been maintaining my own fork.
[408.6] MustardTiger: I just want to make sure it is very, very, very safe before I consider upstreaming it.
[412.68] MustardTiger: I've been flying it for a couple months now, though, and it's been absolutely rock solid.
[416.04] MustardTiger: So I think we're at a good state where I should probably move to get it merged upstream.
[421.56] MustardTiger: As to the OSD implementation, you might notice the iNav one is pretty,
[427.32] MustardTiger: in my opinion, complicated.
[428.92] MustardTiger: It's trying to be a HUD, which I think is a really, really cool idea.
[434.28] MustardTiger: And of course, opinions are everybody's own, right?
[438.28] MustardTiger: And my opinion is that the HUD idea for a character-based OSD
[443.4] MustardTiger: just doesn't really work for me.
[446.76] MustardTiger: It jumps all over the place.
[448.04] MustardTiger: It never quite shows you where the person actually is.
[452.44] MustardTiger: Sometimes it covers them up while you're trying to follow them.
[455.72] MustardTiger: So when I ported this to RduPilot, I chose to take a simpler approach,
[460.12] MustardTiger: which looks a bit like a home arrow with a altitude component as well.
[465.32] MustardTiger: I've got the second link I sent you.
[469.08] MustardTiger: If you scroll down to the bottom there, I've got a screenshot from Analog DVR.
[474.92] MustardTiger: Was that the walk-sail example?
[476.76] MustardTiger: The non-walk-sail one, though.
[478.76] MustardTiger: So the walk-sail example, the one you're looking at right now,
[481.0] MustardTiger: this is from built into iNav, where you can see that sort of B element moving all over the screen.
[486.92] MustardTiger: And then, yeah, this is the way I implemented it.
[488.92] MustardTiger: Just above the wind speed in the bottom left, where you can see the letter C
[494.44] MustardTiger: and an arrow and 1,500 meters.
[497.24] MustardTiger: That's saying back relative to the direction the aircraft is flying, 1,500 meters and down 124.
[505.4] MustardTiger: This was a beacon not connected to an actual aircraft,
[509.48] MustardTiger: which I'm not sure if we want to jump into that yet next.
[513.96] MustardTiger: If you have an agenda, we can stick with that.
[517.8] Curry: Just interesting to see how it looks.
[519.4] Curry: Because obviously, yeah, I'll tell you a point.
[521.16] Curry: If you've got a pixel-based OSD, then that sort of nice smooth thing on a radar screen
[527.48] Curry: would work very well.
[528.2] Curry: But when you haven't, I think, as you said, it's much more sensible to have just a fixed thing,
[534.28] Curry: say the C is this way, and it's here's the altitude, and here's how far it is away.
[539.8] Curry: I think that works better.
[540.44] Curry: Exactly, yeah.
[541.4] MustardTiger: And that's what's worked tremendously well for me.
[543.32] MustardTiger: We're all used to flying towards a home arrow if we need it.
[545.48] MustardTiger: So this is the same kind of thing.
[548.68] MustardTiger: So as I mentioned just a moment ago, this is a beacon,
[551.4] MustardTiger: not necessarily connected to an aircraft.
[553.72] MustardTiger: This is one of the other things I wanted to support with formation flight versus INAP radar.
[558.76] MustardTiger: INAP radar requires being connected to an MSP-capable flight controller
[563.48] MustardTiger: to establish its position and everything.
[565.8] MustardTiger: With formation flight, I implemented built-in GPS capabilities
[569.96] MustardTiger: so that if your formation flight radio has its own GPS, it can be a beacon on its own.
[576.12] MustardTiger: That might seem silly.
[577.0] MustardTiger: Why would you want that?
[578.36] MustardTiger: Well, a couple of things.
[579.88] MustardTiger: One, if you're doing cinematic work and trying to, say, follow somebody, follow a car,
[584.6] MustardTiger: follow a you-get-the-idea, you stick these beacons in the car,
[588.76] MustardTiger: you stick these beacons in whatever you want,
[591.4] MustardTiger: and now you've got a real-time lock on exactly where they are.
[595.4] MustardTiger: This allows you to do some really cool stuff.
[597.16] MustardTiger: Everybody loves the cinematic shot where the drone rises over a visual obstacle, right?
[602.92] MustardTiger: As they rise over the obstacle, the thing they're supposed to be looking at is in-shot.
[607.64] MustardTiger: Normally, that's hard to time.
[608.84] MustardTiger: That's hard to figure out, right?
[609.96] MustardTiger: You've got to know where everybody is.
[611.16] MustardTiger: You've got to be on radios.
[612.6] MustardTiger: Now you've got an arrow pointing to exactly where that thing is you're supposed to be following.
[616.52] MustardTiger: It makes it much easier to hit that target.
[619.72] Stephen: I guess you can do it with multiple participants as well.
[623.0] MustardTiger: Yeah, exactly.
[625.0] MustardTiger: This will work with up to six people in the air at a time.
[628.2] MustardTiger: You and five of your best friends can all have this positioning up and running.
[632.76] Frank: That does sound interesting.
[635.24] Frank: You're saying as well that the big feature of this is that it uses very cheap hardware.
[639.48] Frank: I saw it as using, when I was looking at it, it was using the EP-1.
[647.24] Frank: In the UK, that's like 10 pounds for an E LRS receiver.
[650.52] Frank: You don't have to be using E LRS, obviously.
[652.36] Frank: You can just have this being just the formation flight radio.
[658.28] Frank: Is that what you're then just wiring into a GPS?
[663.16] MustardTiger: Yeah, so it gets wired directly to an MSP speaking UART on your flight controller.
[669.88] MustardTiger: Just the same ways you would wire in, say a DJI air unit or a walk snail unit, anything like that.
[676.36] MustardTiger: Same exact configuration, just turn on the MSP flag and that's what it takes.
[680.52] MustardTiger: I've got specific instructions on the formationflight.org website for how to set up each
[684.84] MustardTiger: flight controller, but not to get too far down that road.
[689.0] MustardTiger: It's not specific to Express LRS at all.
[691.32] MustardTiger: You can use this with DragonLink, Crossfire, Tracer, E LRS, whatever you might choose to use.
[698.68] MustardTiger: E LRS just happens to be a really good way to get
[701.96] MustardTiger: affordable hardware, easy to find hardware, and lightweight hardware.
[706.76] Frank: Yeah, absolutely.
[707.48] Frank: I mean, if we're saying that for 20 pounds, me and a mate could have these radios connected and
[716.52] Frank: be seeing each other on our OSDs, that's pretty impressive.
[720.68] MustardTiger: Absolutely, yeah.
[721.56] MustardTiger: And versus the hardware that would otherwise be required to run iNav radar,
[725.48] MustardTiger: looks like around 31 US dollars right now.
[728.92] Frank: And that's per airframe, so that's doubling that just to have the first dot on your screen.
[736.6] MustardTiger: Yep, all with smaller antennas, faster updates.
[740.28] MustardTiger: Yeah, it's hopefully a pretty compelling argument to be made.
[744.2] Stephen: Absolutely.
[745.72] Stephen: If someone's beginning, I looked at the flashing side that the flashing is a little bit more
[749.88] Stephen: involved than Express LRS, right?
[751.56] Stephen: You need to use the kind of ESP programming tools, developer tools.
[755.88] MustardTiger: You got a couple options.
[758.12] MustardTiger: For now, I haven't built my own configurator or anything.
[760.92] MustardTiger: Right now, the project is pretty much me and a couple of other folks who have made some
[764.68] MustardTiger: contributions.
[765.32] MustardTiger: Thank you very much, by the way.
[767.08] MustardTiger: But to that end, Express LRS has almost a dozen regular devs.
[772.04] MustardTiger: I'm soloing this.
[773.48] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[774.28] MustardTiger: No configurator, nothing fancy.
[776.28] MustardTiger: The plus side is the binary packages we create in our build system,
[781.08] MustardTiger: which includes automated builds every time I issue an actual release,
[784.6] MustardTiger: right, can be web flashed to an ELS receiver.
[789.0] MustardTiger: So if you have a brand new ELS receiver out of the package, you can boot it up,
[793.56] MustardTiger: hop onto its Wi-Fi, upload formation flight, and now it runs formation flight.
[797.0] MustardTiger: Oh, that's really nice.
[798.2] MustardTiger: Okay.
[798.6] Stephen: Yeah, so nice and slick in that way.
[801.56] Stephen: And the subsequent updates are done over its own web interface as well?
[806.36] Stephen: Yep, that's correct.
[807.24] Stephen: All over the air updatable and everything.
[809.8] Stephen: Wow.
[810.68] Stephen: Suddenly, the existence of cheap Wi-Fi chips has made a lot of the configuration hassle
[815.24] Stephen: evaporate.
[816.36] Stephen: We often reminisce about old times on this show and VTXs, which had dip switches and
[820.44] Stephen: the like, and it seems like a different world compared to that.
[823.48] Stephen: That's really impressive to be able to do that on 11 mils by 11 mil
[829.24] Stephen: under grams worth of hardware.
[831.88] MustardTiger: Exactly.
[832.52] MustardTiger: Yeah, it's really impressive what the ESP chips have allowed us to do.
[837.08] MustardTiger: And especially, you know, keeping up with the timing of all six and
[842.04] MustardTiger: the ESP just keeps on doing it.
[843.96] MustardTiger: It's happy to do it.
[845.08] Frank: I think we can definitely all think back to a time where this would have been handy,
[851.4] Frank: where we've been flying around as a group.
[853.8] Frank: And like you say, particularly on the analog stuff,
[857.24] Frank: but even with digital, finding people in the air, I mean, even with a fairly large model
[865.0] Frank: to trace, it can be tricky sometimes if you've got a very dark model against the ground.
[871.0] Stephen: You get 50 yards away and all bets are off unless you've got perfect video, right?
[875.32] Curry: Yeah, for people who haven't tried it before, it is really difficult.
[880.44] Curry: And getting the hang of it is a real skill.
[883.32] Curry: And so we've done things in the past like we'll do sort of a lap.
[888.92] Curry: So we're all going around a lap and we can kind of get each other.
[892.52] Curry: But if you're on sort of a further out and you're trying to do some sort of epic chase
[898.04] Curry: from a distance and you lose somebody, it's like, where are you?
[902.52] Curry: I'm over the trees.
[904.28] Curry: Yeah, there's trees everywhere.
[905.4] Curry: We're about over the trees by the field.
[907.48] Curry: Yeah, that's still like vague.
[909.24] Curry: It just goes on and on.
[911.0] Curry: Yeah, having that sort of thing is really handy.
[913.4] Curry: And being able to just, even if you can't see them and you're starting to draw towards them,
[917.8] Curry: if you can just see how far away, then you can manage your speed.
[920.76] Curry: Because what can often happen is like, I see you.
[924.52] Curry: Soaring by.
[930.04] MustardTiger: Oh, my apologies.
[930.84] MustardTiger: I dropped the screenshot into the Formation Flight Discord.
[935.16] MustardTiger: My apologies.
[936.04] MustardTiger: Oh, well, I'm here.
[936.84] MustardTiger: May as well shout that out.
[937.72] MustardTiger: Hey, there's a Formation Flight Discord.
[939.88] MustardTiger: The link is in the description of this livestream if you want to jump into it.
[944.12] Frank: That is how I got into it.
[945.64] Frank: So, yep.
[946.12] Frank: There you go.
[947.0] MustardTiger: If you need any help setting it up.
[948.52] MustardTiger: If you have any questions, I'm there pretty often.
[952.68] MustardTiger: And there's a nice community of lovely folks who'd be happy to answer your questions.
[957.8] Stephen: This is what you see off of your tiny little ERS receiver.
[962.76] MustardTiger: Yeah, the image looks like it's getting cut off just a little bit.
[965.72] MustardTiger: It was a little bit more on the right side.
[967.0] MustardTiger: I'm not sure if...
[967.8] Stephen: Let me try and zoom.
[970.44] Stephen: I had it zoomed in.
[971.8] Stephen: It's unzoomed.
[972.84] Stephen: That wheel.
[973.48] Frank: Okay.
[973.8] Frank: Yeah.
[974.52] Frank: Everyone listening along, this is a...
[976.92] Frank: I mean, if you saw this just in a normal website, you wouldn't think anything of it.
[983.32] Frank: I mean, it looks...
[984.12] Frank: It's a very nicely polished dashboard for devices.
[988.28] Frank: It looks very nice.
[989.72] MustardTiger: Thank you.
[990.2] MustardTiger: Thank you.
[990.6] MustardTiger: I'm not a front-end web designer.
[992.36] MustardTiger: I put on my front-end web designer hat and slapped this together in a day.
[996.76] MustardTiger: And I think it turned out all right for all things considered.
[1000.68] MustardTiger: Yeah, yeah.
[1002.2] MustardTiger: I guess it was a tailwind is the framework I used.
[1005.24] Stephen: It looks cool.
[1006.6] Stephen: So for our audio listeners, we've got a very cleanly designed webpage with a dashboard and
[1013.0] Stephen: an update section.
[1014.52] Stephen: We've got some readings from the flight controller to tell us whether one is attached or otherwise.
[1020.12] Stephen: We've got the GPS status.
[1021.8] Stephen: We've got a list of peers and whether encryption is enabled or not,
[1026.2] Stephen: which is an interesting feature.
[1027.56] Stephen: More on that later, I guess.
[1029.32] Stephen: And then we can see a list of peers and we can see a list of radios.
[1033.48] Stephen: So you can see at a glance, am I actually going to pick up any peers?
[1037.8] Stephen: Let's check on the ground.
[1038.84] Stephen: Let's make sure we can all see each other before we go and lift off and start flying on the system.
[1044.04] Stephen: So that's kind of neat.
[1046.28] Stephen: Absolutely, yeah.
[1047.08] MustardTiger: So I could talk through a few things in this display as well.
[1051.48] MustardTiger: Up in the top left corner, you can see what flight controller it thinks it's connected to.
[1056.36] MustardTiger: It supports, as I've mentioned, iNav, R2Pilot, and then, oh, I guess we accidentally rabbit
[1061.48] MustardTiger: trailed a little bit off of this.
[1062.84] MustardTiger: There is a Betaflight fork that I have put together.
[1067.8] MustardTiger: It is more ugly than the R2Pilot fork.
[1069.96] MustardTiger: I would not recommend flying it.
[1072.68] MustardTiger: I have tested it for a grand total of about five minutes, but it does appear to work.
[1078.2] MustardTiger: It does the thing.
[1079.0] MustardTiger: It renders the thing on screen, which would be quite nice for folks who do run Betaflight.
[1083.56] MustardTiger: We persuade you to do a PR?
[1086.28] Stephen: Yeah, absolutely.
[1087.0] Stephen: I'd be happy to PR this.
[1089.08] Stephen: The 4.5 cycles just going through RC now, but 4.6 wide open for PRs and a good time
[1096.2] Stephen: to start discussing the best way to do this.
[1099.08] MustardTiger: Sounds lovely.
[1099.72] MustardTiger: There's a couple of changes I want to incorporate from the R2Pilot version I wrote
[1103.88] MustardTiger: into the Betaflight fork, so I'll get that going.
[1107.64] MustardTiger: Of course, as I mentioned, there's a lot to do, and I'm one man, so they're my best.
[1113.24] Stephen: Well, yeah, you've probably got a judging by the time between 4.4 and 4.5 release
[1117.4] Stephen: candidates, so I don't think there's a hurry on that one.
[1120.44] MustardTiger: Gotcha.
[1120.92] MustardTiger: Yeah, there you go.
[1122.92] MustardTiger: Other things, I mentioned that you can use an internal GPS, but by default,
[1126.36] MustardTiger: Formation Flight will just pull GPS from your flight controller,
[1129.0] MustardTiger: so no need to do anything crazy there.
[1130.52] MustardTiger: All you got to do is hook it up to an MSP UART,
[1133.16] MustardTiger: and it will negotiate with your flight controller, figure out GPS location, all of that.
[1138.68] MustardTiger: The encryption is an interesting note, as you mentioned more on that later.
[1143.08] MustardTiger: iNAV radar is unencrypted, which is fine for what it's intending to be.
[1148.04] MustardTiger: My reason for adding encryption is not necessarily for privacy first and foremost.
[1153.72] MustardTiger: The goal of it is to essentially prevent people from cross-talking, right?
[1159.4] MustardTiger: Be able to use different groups, and if we can get some very light crypto in there,
[1164.68] MustardTiger: as a matter of course, that might be nice.
[1167.0] MustardTiger: One thing to note, or I suppose a few things to note,
[1170.04] MustardTiger: the crypto is not super-duper secure.
[1172.76] MustardTiger: It will not stand up against an actual dedicated attacker.
[1176.28] MustardTiger: It's good enough.
[1179.64] MustardTiger: Again, it's intended primarily to be an inter-group deterrence,
[1184.84] Stephen: effectively, right?
[1185.48] Stephen: So instead of having to set a group ID and tally that up across all the members
[1190.36] Stephen: who are flying in a field, say, you enable crypto,
[1194.36] Stephen: and when you see each other, you negotiate a crypto key,
[1197.32] Stephen: and then if another group of flyers a few miles away
[1200.2] Stephen: happen to start spewing signal and you can hit and you can see them,
[1203.88] Stephen: then that's going to be discarded and not start confusing you when you're in the air.
[1208.76] MustardTiger: Exactly, yeah.
[1209.56] MustardTiger: And that's the main goal.
[1211.56] MustardTiger: If you do want to rotate this key, it's a little complicated now.
[1214.2] MustardTiger: Again, that's one of the things on the back burner to clean up.
[1218.44] MustardTiger: But yeah, this does exist, and it hopefully should provide
[1221.88] MustardTiger: the bare minimum of additional privacy as well, if you're interested in that.
[1226.36] MustardTiger: Caveat, if you're using ham frequencies to run this,
[1229.88] MustardTiger: using ham power levels, blah, blah, blah, it might not be compliant.
[1233.4] MustardTiger: Figured I'd throw that out there.
[1235.32] MustardTiger: Everybody who does this hobby should hopefully have a good understanding of radio stuff,
[1239.48] MustardTiger: what is and isn't right to do.
[1240.68] MustardTiger: So your experience may vary, do the right thing for your regulatory environment, et cetera, et cetera.
[1247.08] Stephen: So you've got a group of people, and you want to say that these are the pilots in the group,
[1251.88] Stephen: and if someone, a couple of fields over with a big antenna,
[1255.64] Stephen: starts flying with formation flight, we don't want to see their data.
[1260.04] Stephen: How do people lock that in before they take off?
[1264.44] MustardTiger: It's presently done during build time.
[1268.12] MustardTiger: My intention is right, you can see on the left side, there's dashboard and update.
[1272.92] MustardTiger: I have something turned off in the UI right now, which is a settings tab.
[1277.16] MustardTiger: My hope is to have a whole bunch of settings.
[1278.52] MustardTiger: You can flip on and off from there,
[1279.96] MustardTiger: one of which being change of the group key from that settings display if you want to.
[1284.2] MustardTiger: And that would get saved to persistent storage,
[1285.88] MustardTiger: so you don't need to do it every time just once.
[1288.2] Stephen: So you just send the group key to your friends via whatever chat client,
[1292.44] Stephen: and then when they connect to the web page,
[1294.76] Stephen: they synchronize the group key to the one you're using for that flying session, right?
[1298.84] MustardTiger: Exactly, and the group key is plain alpha numeric,
[1302.12] MustardTiger: so you can use whatever word you want.
[1304.6] MustardTiger: By default, encryption is enabled with the group key open sesame.
[1308.76] MustardTiger: That way, it's encrypted by default,
[1312.04] MustardTiger: but by default, you'll also connect to one another, right?
[1317.32] Stephen: Okay, makes sense.
[1319.72] Stephen: Wow, there's a lot going on here.
[1321.48] Stephen: Congratulations, I appreciate a single developer working in their spare time.
[1326.52] Stephen: You've accomplished a heck of a lot,
[1328.12] Stephen: considering the iNav radar has been around for a few years,
[1331.08] Stephen: and just kind of been ticking along.
[1333.24] Stephen: This is kind of an explosive amount of activity.
[1336.68] Stephen: Thank you.
[1337.48] MustardTiger: I don't know, it was something of a passion project.
[1340.84] MustardTiger: After I got it working in the first couple of changes I made,
[1344.28] MustardTiger: it just went on from there,
[1345.64] MustardTiger: and I have to say a huge thank you to the folks who've been helping me out in testing,
[1349.56] MustardTiger: helping me out in development.
[1350.84] MustardTiger: Not sure how many of them want their name shouted out,
[1353.56] MustardTiger: but there's some great folks out there who have been helping a lot,
[1357.4] MustardTiger: so thank you very, very much.
[1360.04] Frank: I guess that's mainly in the Discord again, is it?
[1362.68] MustardTiger: Yeah, so there's some folks in the Discord
[1364.68] MustardTiger: who have been helping out with testing,
[1366.84] MustardTiger: helping out with development.
[1369.4] MustardTiger: They're lovely folks, I've got a little label for them.
[1373.96] MustardTiger: They're colored blue in there,
[1375.24] MustardTiger: people who have been running it since the early days,
[1377.08] MustardTiger: beta testing, willing to test all the silly broken things
[1380.44] MustardTiger: that occur with an early project like this.
[1382.6] MustardTiger: So I really appreciate all their help,
[1384.52] MustardTiger: as well as some folks locally here in the Pacific Northwest
[1386.84] MustardTiger: who've been flying with me since the very early fork of iNav radar days.
[1391.56] Frank: Yeah, and you were saying as well about the sort of hocking back.
[1396.36] Frank: There's the idea of the beacon,
[1398.52] Frank: where you've got just the formation plate radio
[1403.96] Frank: connected direct to a GPS.
[1406.6] Frank: Yeah.
[1408.92] Frank: How is that working?
[1410.68] Frank: I guess because you've got the UART on the radio,
[1415.16] Frank: it can just connect to a UART on a GPS and that just works.
[1419.96] MustardTiger: Yeah, so there's a piece of hardware I would recommend for this.
[1422.28] MustardTiger: You can build it yourself, it's a little bit complicated.
[1425.56] MustardTiger: It's not terrible, but there's already an existing piece of hardware,
[1429.0] MustardTiger: and that's the LILIGO, TTCO, T-BEAM.
[1432.68] MustardTiger: That's Tango, Bravo, Echo, Alpha, Mic.
[1436.84] MustardTiger: That's a product that has an inbuilt 900 megahertz,
[1441.8] MustardTiger: unfortunately, lower modem with GPS and an 18650.
[1448.6] MustardTiger: So if you are using 900 megahertz formation flight,
[1452.68] MustardTiger: this is a great, great radio to use as a beacon,
[1455.24] MustardTiger: built-in antenna, built-in GPS.
[1457.56] MustardTiger: There's a target for it, you build it, throw it,
[1459.88] MustardTiger: wherever it needs to be, and it'll just work.
[1462.44] MustardTiger: Are you doing an NMEA GPS?
[1466.52] MustardTiger: Yeah, right now it is NMEA only.
[1468.84] MustardTiger: I do want to support the UBLOX protocol,
[1470.84] MustardTiger: but once again, PRs are accepted if you're interested in that feature.
[1475.72] Stephen: Well, it looks like a lot of those NMEA GPS
[1478.36] Stephen: might be less useful in other locations.
[1481.0] Stephen: So yeah, could be a good chance to take them out
[1484.84] Stephen: and repurpose them for formation flight.
[1487.64] MustardTiger: Absolutely, yeah.
[1488.68] MustardTiger: And it'll do auto-bod and everything.
[1490.68] MustardTiger: So as long as the GPS speaks NMEA
[1492.44] MustardTiger: and it's connected to a secondary UART,
[1494.6] MustardTiger: the SP32 has three UARTs.
[1496.04] MustardTiger: Yeah, that'll just work.
[1498.76] Curry: I was just going to ask, if you're flying with multiple pilots,
[1502.92] Curry: is it a case of you configure it so you've got like multi,
[1506.04] Curry: like I've got pilot A, pilot B, pilot C, here, here, here,
[1508.84] Curry: or have you built in some sort of thing
[1510.28] Curry: so you can switch between positions of people?
[1514.12] MustardTiger: Yeah, yeah, that's a lovely question.
[1515.48] MustardTiger: So the INAF existing OSD,
[1519.32] MustardTiger: the one that I haven't made any changes to,
[1522.2] MustardTiger: tries to do the HUD thing.
[1523.32] MustardTiger: So every pilot that's up,
[1524.68] MustardTiger: you'll see their tile exist in the HUD, essentially,
[1529.16] MustardTiger: for the one that I created,
[1530.28] MustardTiger: which is more like a home position arrow,
[1532.36] MustardTiger: every, I believe, two seconds,
[1534.28] MustardTiger: it'll rotate through every active peer.
[1536.92] MustardTiger: So if you can hear two people,
[1538.2] MustardTiger: it'll go back and forth every two seconds,
[1539.96] MustardTiger: which, to me, that's probably good enough.
[1545.7] Stephen: If anybody else has a better idea on how to incorporate that,
[1548.1] Stephen: I'd be happy to hear it.
[1549.06] Stephen: Well, with every higher resolution displays,
[1552.1] Stephen: for some of the digital systems,
[1553.62] Stephen: it might be feasible to even have all six
[1556.34] Stephen: permanently on screen just as a single element.
[1560.18] Stephen: Absolutely, yeah.
[1562.58] Curry: Are the digital systems actually pixel capable?
[1565.38] Curry: I mean, they're obviously working character mode at the moment,
[1567.7] Curry: but is there a possibility
[1570.26] Curry: of them doing something different?
[1571.38] Stephen: So the MSP link between the flight controller
[1574.66] Stephen: and the goggles is character-based,
[1577.7] Stephen: but on the goggles,
[1578.9] Stephen: they can pretty much just render PNGs onto the goggles.
[1582.74] Stephen: So you can kind of do whatever you want on the goggles,
[1585.7] Stephen: but you've got that limited bandwidth
[1587.62] Stephen: between the flight controller
[1588.98] Stephen: and that over-the-air link over to the goggles,
[1591.14] Stephen: which kind of chokes the possibility of doing that
[1593.38] Stephen: in a really elegant fashion, unfortunately.
[1595.22] MustardTiger: Mm-hmm.
[1597.99] MustardTiger: And as Dominic Clifton has mentioned in the comments,
[1600.95] MustardTiger: he's got a pixel-based OSD that works with all his stuff.
[1604.71] MustardTiger: And yeah, that would be very, very, very slick.
[1608.07] MustardTiger: If you know your camera FOV
[1609.43] MustardTiger: and can account for that in a pixel-based OSD
[1611.43] MustardTiger: with very high resolution,
[1612.87] MustardTiger: yeah, you could do some think fighter jet style.
[1617.59] Stephen: That would be real slick.
[1618.95] Stephen: You've got two factors to make that moving OSD
[1623.43] Stephen: with the position markers move.
[1624.63] Stephen: You've got to figure out your FPV camera angle
[1628.07] Stephen: and also the FOV angle.
[1631.51] Stephen: And if those numbers are off,
[1632.71] Stephen: it's going to be kind of confusing, isn't it?
[1635.59] MustardTiger: Yeah, yeah.
[1636.15] MustardTiger: So this is an existing problem as well
[1637.91] MustardTiger: with the iNav implementation as it stands.
[1639.67] MustardTiger: And one of the things that when I ported it to autopilot,
[1643.43] MustardTiger: I decided to go a different direction.
[1644.95] MustardTiger: Again, it's my opinion.
[1646.07] MustardTiger: I like the simplicity of a single,
[1648.63] MustardTiger: well, a pair of vectors, right?
[1649.91] MustardTiger: A horizontal vector and a vertical vector.
[1652.87] MustardTiger: If other folks like OSD more,
[1654.71] MustardTiger: I'd be happy to hear it.
[1657.35] MustardTiger: However you want to make it work on the flight controller
[1659.19] MustardTiger: will work with formation of flight.
[1660.55] MustardTiger: It doesn't care.
[1661.19] MustardTiger: All it does is feeds the position information.
[1662.95] MustardTiger: So if you'd prefer the OSD,
[1665.19] MustardTiger: that's something you absolutely have the option to do.
[1668.55] Stephen: There we are.
[1669.27] Stephen: So there's an update from iNav here
[1671.27] Stephen: by the looks of it, Mark with the CFPV.
[1675.11] Stephen: Mr. Tiger, the HUD elements will be adjustable
[1677.91] Stephen: and split in separate elements with 7.0 probably.
[1681.75] Stephen: So you can select if you want to see heading,
[1683.75] Stephen: distance, RSSI, et cetera.
[1685.43] Stephen: So that could be interesting.
[1687.11] MustardTiger: Neat, yeah, that definitely clean up the UI on iNav.
[1690.95] Stephen: Cool.
[1692.39] Stephen: Yeah, I think Mark's from the iNav fixed-wing group.
[1695.03] Stephen: I encourage you to have a look at formationflight.org
[1699.35] Stephen: and see what's going on there
[1701.19] Stephen: because there's a really interesting development
[1703.59] Stephen: that kind of enables that feature
[1705.19] Stephen: for a bunch of different people
[1706.71] Stephen: and makes it easier to use much cheaper hardware.
[1709.51] Stephen: It's the short premise of this
[1711.91] Stephen: in case any other people have jumped in halfway through.
[1714.79] Stephen: I did spam the chat link around quite a few places,
[1717.59] Stephen: but it's easy to forget about these things.
[1719.91] Stephen: So yeah, the real gotcha here was previously you needed
[1723.99] Stephen: to basically be an ESP32 developer
[1726.47] Stephen: to get this thing up and running.
[1728.31] Stephen: But now we're seeing you can take very cheap hardware
[1731.59] Stephen: that's been designed for Express LRS
[1733.35] Stephen: and is now available not just cheaply,
[1735.91] Stephen: but also worldwide.
[1737.11] Stephen: So you don't need to go to stores on AliExpress
[1739.51] Stephen: and hunt this stuff down.
[1740.79] Stephen: So you can go to your local RC store
[1743.27] Stephen: and you can get 10 pounds,
[1745.51] Stephen: 10 of your local currency units generally
[1748.07] Stephen: worth of Express LRS 2.4 gig receiver,
[1750.71] Stephen: which is tiny and light.
[1752.95] Stephen: And you can program this
[1754.95] Stephen: using the existing Express LRS web flashing system,
[1759.11] Stephen: which is easy to use
[1760.47] Stephen: and functions as an access point already.
[1762.47] Stephen: So you could even do it from a mobile phone
[1764.39] Stephen: and things like that.
[1766.07] Stephen: And then all the configuration is going to be handled
[1768.95] Stephen: within that web interface.
[1770.47] Stephen: So you don't need to go and get complex tools
[1772.63] Stephen: on your PC to make this work,
[1775.19] Stephen: which I think it tackles the cost,
[1778.79] Stephen: tackles availability,
[1780.55] Stephen: and it tackles ease of use all in one fell swoop,
[1783.11] Stephen: which is just fantastic to see.
[1785.51] MustardTiger: Thank you. Yeah, that was sort of my goal with it,
[1788.15] MustardTiger: make it a little bit easier to use
[1789.19] MustardTiger: and hopefully get more folks using it, right?
[1791.43] MustardTiger: I'd have radar was tremendous.
[1792.79] MustardTiger: And I can't say thank you enough
[1794.07] MustardTiger: to all the folks who did work on that,
[1795.51] MustardTiger: especially Olivia C,
[1796.55] MustardTiger: who's been doing the main development on it recently.
[1800.55] MustardTiger: At this point, I just wanted to take it a few steps further
[1803.59] MustardTiger: and hopefully get more folks using it, right?
[1806.15] MustardTiger: And I thought getting that barrier of less expensive,
[1808.95] MustardTiger: more easily available hardware is a huge difference.
[1811.99] MustardTiger: And yeah, Mark, to answer your comment there,
[1814.23] MustardTiger: no, you don't need to use Express LRS.
[1816.47] MustardTiger: It's just the hardware is cheap and available.
[1819.19] MustardTiger: So I wrote formation flight
[1820.95] MustardTiger: primarily to target Express LRS hardware.
[1823.19] MustardTiger: It does work with pretty much any ESP variants.
[1826.95] MustardTiger: And if nobody else has anything,
[1828.95] MustardTiger: I figure Insipid Monkey asked a question
[1832.39] MustardTiger: about the ESP-NOW functionality.
[1834.39] MustardTiger: You mind if I jump into that?
[1835.35] Stephen: Oh, absolutely.
[1836.07] Stephen: I was going to mention that myself.
[1837.75] MustardTiger: Sweet. Yeah.
[1838.63] MustardTiger: So ESP-NOW is a really neat thing
[1840.95] MustardTiger: that's supported by ESP8266 and ESP32 microcontrollers.
[1845.67] MustardTiger: They, of course, have the built-in Wi-Fi.
[1847.59] MustardTiger: They also have the ability to do something called ESP-NOW,
[1851.35] MustardTiger: which is effectively a...
[1853.43] MustardTiger: I think the kindest term I can use
[1858.39] MustardTiger: is a bastardization of Wi-Fi frames
[1861.27] MustardTiger: in order to remove a lot of the infrastructure
[1864.07] MustardTiger: around Wi-Fi, right?
[1865.19] MustardTiger: That is to say, there's no network name
[1868.87] MustardTiger: or anything like that.
[1869.67] MustardTiger: It works essentially as a broadcast mechanism.
[1873.27] MustardTiger: So that's one of the additional radio types
[1875.43] MustardTiger: I implemented for formation flight.
[1877.27] MustardTiger: The goal being primarily you would use LoRa
[1879.83] MustardTiger: on whatever frequency you chose.
[1881.99] MustardTiger: 2.4 is, of course, my recommendation.
[1883.91] MustardTiger: It gets just about 10K worth of range,
[1886.39] MustardTiger: which hopefully should be more and more and more than enough
[1888.95] MustardTiger: for the vast majority of use cases.
[1891.35] MustardTiger: If you really want more, there's 90433,
[1893.67] MustardTiger: which are right around 100Ks.
[1896.47] MustardTiger: But for most folks, 2.4 LoRa is going to be the way to do it.
[1900.39] MustardTiger: Primarily, what my goal with ESP-NOW is two things.
[1904.07] MustardTiger: A, for folks who don't want to do LoRa-based stuff,
[1907.67] MustardTiger: ESP-NOW works up to about 1K,
[1910.71] MustardTiger: and it's very easy and cheap to find ESP chips on their own.
[1914.95] MustardTiger: They cost right around $2 or $3 US
[1918.71] MustardTiger: if you find them in the right places.
[1920.47] MustardTiger: Again, the range is going to be significantly less.
[1922.55] MustardTiger: It's about 1 to 2K max,
[1925.27] MustardTiger: but they work just the same as the LoRa versions.
[1928.15] MustardTiger: My other goal with ESP-NOW, and this is not realized yet,
[1931.11] MustardTiger: is to have a secondary link in addition to your LoRa link
[1934.39] MustardTiger: such that if you fly 2.4 LoRa formation flight
[1938.23] MustardTiger: and your friend flies 900 LoRa formation flight,
[1940.79] MustardTiger: you'll still be able to connect to each other
[1942.39] MustardTiger: as long as you're within 1 to 2Ks.
[1945.43] MustardTiger: If you were further away, then LoRa would work.
[1948.87] MustardTiger: Nice. That sounds like the best of both worlds.
[1953.27] MustardTiger: Yeah, I'm excited about the potential that has.
[1959.11] MustardTiger: You can turn it on right now,
[1960.47] MustardTiger: but it does horrible things to your timing.
[1964.15] MustardTiger: All the receivers try and synchronize with one another,
[1966.47] MustardTiger: and when you have two radios operational,
[1969.11] MustardTiger: they can get into some really interesting states
[1971.27] Frank: when you start doing that.
[1996.47] Frank: Pause slash, let's drone out.
[1998.87] Stephen: So we have a question from Dominic Clifton-Hydra
[2002.63] Stephen: about the ESP hardware that you've been using.
[2005.51] Stephen: Wondering if you've looked at the new S3 chip from ESP32.
[2009.51] Stephen: Absolutely, yes.
[2010.39] MustardTiger: And I've got one on my desk right here,
[2011.75] MustardTiger: which is the Lilligo T3 S3.
[2016.87] MustardTiger: And I've got formation flight up and running on that.
[2019.35] MustardTiger: Unfortunately, I think this is missing one pin
[2021.51] MustardTiger: to make it usable by default,
[2022.95] MustardTiger: but I think I'll be able to bodge it in.
[2025.83] MustardTiger: This particular piece of hardware,
[2027.27] MustardTiger: it's a pretty big one. It's a dev board.
[2029.19] MustardTiger: But yes, absolutely.
[2030.07] MustardTiger: If you've got it running on S3,
[2031.43] MustardTiger: and you've got a, in this case,
[2033.67] MustardTiger: I believe they forgot to connect the DIO one line,
[2036.39] MustardTiger: whatever you want to call that.
[2038.31] MustardTiger: I use both of the DIO pins in my interaction with the SX1280.
[2043.43] MustardTiger: So I believe this board will require a bodge to work,
[2046.07] MustardTiger: but if your board has both of the DIO pins connected,
[2049.27] MustardTiger: which I assume it does, then yes, absolutely.
[2051.99] MustardTiger: You could run formation flight directly on there.
[2056.14] Stephen: Excellent. Well, just compatible with everything
[2059.02] Stephen: you can get your hands on by the sound of it,
[2060.46] Stephen: which is fantastic.
[2061.42] Stephen: So they've got all the fixed-wing people out there
[2063.98] Stephen: who are talking about formation flying.
[2065.74] Stephen: If you have GPS, this is just the way to go, isn't it?
[2069.74] Curry: And I think one to two kilometers on ASP now is like,
[2073.82] Curry: if you want more, then you may be some way off flying in formation.
[2078.22] Curry: Normally, you're missing some of those 50 meters.
[2080.54] Curry: It's not like, oh, I'm 10 kilometers that way.
[2082.46] Curry: It's like, you've been the wrong way.
[2084.38] Stephen: We're flying a couple of years ago.
[2086.62] Stephen: Like, one and a half kilometers away,
[2088.86] Stephen: your main radio link would be dead anyway.
[2092.3] MustardTiger: Absolutely, yeah.
[2093.18] MustardTiger: So we've had really good experiences with ASP now,
[2095.58] MustardTiger: as long as you have an external antenna.
[2098.06] MustardTiger: If you have an internal antenna, it's not great.
[2100.54] MustardTiger: It's around 100 meters.
[2103.1] MustardTiger: But yeah, it absolutely does work.
[2105.18] MustardTiger: It works surprisingly well.
[2106.86] MustardTiger: I think we've gotten far more range out of it
[2108.54] MustardTiger: than any of us expected.
[2110.7] MustardTiger: Right about, I think, 1.8 k's is the absolute max
[2113.82] MustardTiger: we've seen in practice.
[2114.86] MustardTiger: But that's about 1k more than I expected it to do
[2120.54] MustardTiger: in its absolute best case.
[2121.66] MustardTiger: So yeah, it is absolutely an option if you want it.
[2123.66] MustardTiger: I think 2.4 Laura is where the main majority of development
[2127.34] MustardTiger: is going to be.
[2127.98] MustardTiger: But yeah, if you have a bare ESP32 or an 8266 Dev board,
[2133.26] MustardTiger: WeMos D1 Mini, whatever you might have,
[2136.3] MustardTiger: you can absolutely slap that on there
[2137.66] Stephen: and run it on ESP now.
[2138.7] MustardTiger: Works great.
[2139.18] Stephen: Nice.
[2139.9] Stephen: That's kind of the fascinating use case,
[2141.66] Stephen: as well, of people who, you know, they're flying a wing,
[2143.74] Stephen: they don't have a flight controller in it.
[2145.9] Stephen: They could take a little Express LRS receiver
[2148.14] Stephen: or someone could give them a little Express LRS receiver
[2150.78] Stephen: with the GPS connected to it and be like,
[2152.94] Stephen: yeah, here you are.
[2154.46] Stephen: There's like a servo lead attached to it.
[2156.86] Stephen: Power this up and stick it with some hot glue
[2159.02] Stephen: inside your wing and we'll know where you are
[2161.82] Stephen: and we'll come find you.
[2163.74] Stephen: Exactly.
[2164.3] Stephen: That does sound good.
[2166.54] Curry: Yeah, I was just going to say,
[2167.74] Curry: is that a way of like,
[2169.98] Curry: you've got an inexpensive rescue solution,
[2173.66] Curry: like I've crashed my plane somewhere,
[2175.9] Curry: but if the battery is still in place
[2177.42] Curry: and you've still got this signal,
[2179.34] Curry: you can presumably find it
[2181.58] Curry: because you'll know your distance and your GPS coordinates
[2184.54] Curry: and you can turn it along into the field and get it.
[2188.3] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[2188.54] MustardTiger: So this is something we've actually discussed a few times,
[2191.66] MustardTiger: using information flight to be able to find your aircraft.
[2193.9] MustardTiger: Absolutely.
[2195.66] MustardTiger: You can do that right now.
[2196.94] MustardTiger: It works just fine for that.
[2198.3] MustardTiger: I've done that a few times, actually.
[2200.78] MustardTiger: I had some relatively small aircraft go out
[2203.9] MustardTiger: pretty far out in the field and had to go hunt for it.
[2207.5] MustardTiger: And I just brought along that little Ttco T-beam.
[2210.78] MustardTiger: And when I got within about 500 meters,
[2212.54] MustardTiger: that was ESP now on the ground.
[2214.22] MustardTiger: So I expected the range to be reduced.
[2215.74] MustardTiger: It was still pretty darn good.
[2217.5] MustardTiger: It locked on and I've got on the little OLED display
[2220.54] MustardTiger: that I'm X meters away in this direction
[2222.62] MustardTiger: and I was able to walk right to it.
[2224.54] MustardTiger: But I do have some ideas around including boards
[2228.38] MustardTiger: with internal batteries and being able to say,
[2231.98] MustardTiger: hey, the last MSP message I got from the aircraft
[2234.3] MustardTiger: was that it was armed and then I lost the MSP link.
[2237.9] MustardTiger: That tells me the aircraft is down,
[2241.1] MustardTiger: unavailable in some way, shape, or form.
[2243.66] MustardTiger: So stop trying to be a normal formation flight receiver
[2245.98] MustardTiger: and start doing different LoRa encoding
[2249.1] MustardTiger: in order to get longer range.
[2250.78] MustardTiger: That way, hopefully, it would be a little bit better to find.
[2254.86] Frank: I look forward to seeing Currie's videos on this
[2257.42] Frank: adding on to his playlist of various ways
[2260.14] Frank: of finding your crashed aircraft.
[2261.9] Frank: Yeah, feel free to share with me.
[2263.42] Curry: When beepers don't work because it's kilometers away,
[2266.38] Stephen: then yeah, try radioing.
[2268.46] Stephen: Maybe we might see these integrated with lost model alarms
[2271.5] Stephen: because these are not high-powered devices.
[2274.14] Stephen: Would it be possible to integrate with a lost model alarm
[2277.1] Stephen: with a beeper or a battery-backed beeper?
[2279.42] Stephen: Absolutely, yeah.
[2280.62] MustardTiger: Just an ESP chip and a nice little antenna on it
[2283.74] MustardTiger: would be perfect.
[2286.06] MustardTiger: So a few questions in the comments.
[2287.66] MustardTiger: Mark with a C asks, I have three planes
[2290.06] MustardTiger: with the original TDGO LoRa hardware.
[2293.26] MustardTiger: Yes, it does work with the original TDGO LoRa hardware.
[2295.74] MustardTiger: There are targets for all of that.
[2298.3] MustardTiger: You can flash that.
[2299.5] MustardTiger: It's drop-in compatible.
[2301.26] MustardTiger: Unless you're using the V1.6 board,
[2303.42] MustardTiger: I changed which pins are used for RX and TX.
[2306.38] MustardTiger: You got to just move those over real quick.
[2309.42] MustardTiger: Other than that, though, completely drop-in compatible.
[2311.58] MustardTiger: You can use it exactly the same way
[2312.86] MustardTiger: as you have been with INF radar.
[2314.62] MustardTiger: It's just faster, better.
[2317.58] MustardTiger: And then, and Sipidmaniki asks,
[2319.74] MustardTiger: have you touched on using a formation flight in the LRS
[2322.14] MustardTiger: on the same bed, on the same aircraft?
[2325.26] MustardTiger: I was very pleasantly surprised with how well this went.
[2333.74] MustardTiger: I expected it to work,
[2336.14] MustardTiger: but I expected there to be a noticeable hit to LQ.
[2340.14] MustardTiger: I was wrong.
[2343.1] MustardTiger: It works way better than I had ever possibly anticipated.
[2349.02] MustardTiger: I keep the power pretty low information flight,
[2350.94] MustardTiger: just to be sure,
[2352.14] MustardTiger: but I did a pretty considerably LR flight
[2358.7] MustardTiger: at 25 milliwatts TX power for Express LRS.
[2363.9] MustardTiger: A couple of weeks later,
[2364.86] MustardTiger: when I was reviewing that aircraft that I did it with,
[2368.06] MustardTiger: I realized that it had formation flight up
[2369.9] MustardTiger: and running the whole time.
[2371.26] MustardTiger: And I didn't even notice.
[2373.82] MustardTiger: That was with the LRS at minimum power
[2375.82] MustardTiger: for the radio that I use out quite some distance.
[2379.02] MustardTiger: So it seems to be completely unnoticeable,
[2382.38] Stephen: which is great to hear.
[2383.5] Stephen: You were saying you don't cover all of the band
[2386.22] Stephen: that LRS uses, right?
[2387.5] Stephen: You're just in the lower parts of that band,
[2389.26] Stephen: you kind of restricted it a bit?
[2391.18] MustardTiger: Yeah, that's exactly correct.
[2392.3] MustardTiger: So I chose the formation flight to not do frequency hopping.
[2396.3] MustardTiger: And the goal there was a couple-fold.
[2398.62] MustardTiger: A, hopefully it'll simplify the sync procedure.
[2402.86] MustardTiger: Right now, something like the LRS,
[2404.22] MustardTiger: you only have two things to try and synchronize
[2405.9] MustardTiger: with one another, a transmitter and a receiver.
[2407.66] MustardTiger: And one is always in charge with formation flight.
[2411.1] MustardTiger: Who's in charge?
[2412.3] MustardTiger: Who's synchronizing with whom?
[2414.22] MustardTiger: So it's a much tougher problem to solve.
[2416.3] MustardTiger: And when you add more variables like frequency
[2419.02] MustardTiger: and time slot and all this kind of stuff,
[2421.5] MustardTiger: synchronizing becomes really difficult.
[2423.74] MustardTiger: So I chose to keep it,
[2424.7] MustardTiger: just a single frequency, a nice low in the 2.4 gig band.
[2429.42] MustardTiger: And then LRS hops all around up higher.
[2431.82] MustardTiger: So it's pretty much, it doesn't seem to have any impact
[2434.86] MustardTiger: on flying.
[2435.5] MustardTiger: You can run 2.4 LRS alongside formation flight.
[2438.54] MustardTiger: It runs just fine.
[2439.98] Stephen: Awesome.
[2440.54] Stephen: So yeah, maybe one packet in 20 might be colliding.
[2444.86] Stephen: Yeah, exactly.
[2445.74] Frank: It kind of doesn't matter.
[2451.02] Frank: Because you were saying it can do six pilots.
[2453.66] Frank: Is that a limitation of E LRS?
[2456.06] Frank: Or is that just a limitation of formation flight?
[2458.78] Frank: I'm just wondering, is there a case where
[2460.62] Frank: if you had six pilots all using formation flight
[2463.18] Frank: and all using E LRS, is that going to cause a problem?
[2466.62] MustardTiger: It's going to be slightly worse.
[2469.1] MustardTiger: But my experience with running 2.4 systems next to each other,
[2473.82] MustardTiger: modern 2.4 systems, lower based ones,
[2476.3] MustardTiger: they work just surprisingly well altogether.
[2478.78] MustardTiger: I think, yeah, if you had six people
[2480.14] MustardTiger: who are all using E LRS 2.4 control
[2482.46] MustardTiger: and all using formation flight 2.4
[2485.34] MustardTiger: and all using pretty high power and blah, blah, blah.
[2488.86] MustardTiger: You're probably going to see some low LQs, 60s, 70s,
[2491.82] MustardTiger: but that's still super flyable with the E LRS, right?
[2495.74] MustardTiger: One thing you can do is if you're staying pretty close,
[2497.98] MustardTiger: use some of the faster options like the F500 option
[2504.38] MustardTiger: to express E LRS.
[2505.82] MustardTiger: That uses less air time, which would give more folks
[2508.06] MustardTiger: the ability to stay up and running.
[2509.58] MustardTiger: But broadly, yeah, it just works surprisingly well.
[2513.26] MustardTiger: As to yes, is six a limitation?
[2516.46] MustardTiger: It is a soft limitation in the sense
[2521.9] MustardTiger: that I had a couple of variables to balance
[2524.38] MustardTiger: and that was the exact set of variables I chose.
[2528.38] MustardTiger: That is to say, to achieve 10 Hertz,
[2531.42] MustardTiger: it updates 10 times a second, right?
[2533.98] MustardTiger: Across 433, 868, 915, and 24 and ESP now,
[2539.66] MustardTiger: which all have slightly different transmit times
[2542.46] MustardTiger: at the ranges that I wanted to accomplish
[2544.78] MustardTiger: with the number of people in the air
[2547.66] MustardTiger: that I wanted to accomplish.
[2549.42] MustardTiger: The particular set of parameters I chose balances out
[2551.98] MustardTiger: with essentially six people in the air,
[2555.34] MustardTiger: 10 updates per second, and that's the spot that works, right?
[2560.06] Frank: Absolutely, and it makes sense what we have experienced
[2565.18] Frank: with FPV, six is a good number to have in the air.
[2570.3] Frank: I think past six, you're starting to run into
[2572.38] MustardTiger: VTX channel issues and at that point,
[2575.66] MustardTiger: if anybody does really want to run this with eight people,
[2578.62] MustardTiger: 10 people, let me know.
[2581.26] MustardTiger: There are ways we can configure this to work with eight or 10,
[2583.66] MustardTiger: you're just going to sacrifice update rate or range.
[2586.62] MustardTiger: But I figured for the vast majority of people,
[2588.94] MustardTiger: I think 10 Hertz is very good.
[2591.26] MustardTiger: Generally, the nicest GPS as most of us are running
[2594.22] MustardTiger: are exactly 10 Hertz, so that's a really nice balance
[2598.7] MustardTiger: of all those parameters.
[2603.42] Frank: Yeah, that's good.
[2606.06] Frank: Yeah, it makes a ton of sense.
[2607.5] Stephen: I think there's a few people who are struggling
[2609.26] Stephen: to get higher rates of GPS updates,
[2612.7] Stephen: but that's really for that kind of beta
[2614.78] Stephen: flight, like super aggressive return to home,
[2617.74] Stephen: like let's not return to home, like our pilot,
[2620.62] Stephen: let's return to home like a racing quad,
[2622.86] Stephen: like only just rip and do like just an invert,
[2628.3] Stephen: you split us back over the pilot's head and then come down.
[2632.06] Stephen: Yeah, I mean, there's vast GPS that,
[2634.78] Stephen: but I think that the top units are getting to like 18 Hertz,
[2638.38] Stephen: 25 Hertz, so 10 Hertz is still, it's up there.
[2642.38] Stephen: It's good enough for most things.
[2644.54] MustardTiger: Absolutely, yeah.
[2646.86] MustardTiger: I will say the tracking feels super tight.
[2650.38] MustardTiger: Because it does update 10 times per second
[2652.22] MustardTiger: when you're following somebody,
[2653.42] MustardTiger: that position arrow is pretty much dead on them.
[2657.02] MustardTiger: Depending on aircraft, there is a sort of open problem
[2660.14] MustardTiger: I'm still working through,
[2661.18] MustardTiger: which is effectively pipeline delay from GPS
[2665.1] MustardTiger: through flight controller into formation flight,
[2667.26] MustardTiger: formation flight, flight controller, OSD.
[2669.98] MustardTiger: In some cases, I've found that to be maybe 10, 25 milliseconds,
[2674.62] MustardTiger: some weird combinations for some reason,
[2676.94] MustardTiger: that feels more like 200, 300 milliseconds.
[2680.22] MustardTiger: So what that means is the position that it's tracking
[2683.74] MustardTiger: might be slightly behind the person
[2686.22] MustardTiger: that you're actually following.
[2688.38] MustardTiger: I have some ideas on how to solve that.
[2690.46] MustardTiger: The original INF radar did some effectively projection
[2695.26] MustardTiger: using ground speed saying,
[2697.82] MustardTiger: hey, where will you be in a second?
[2702.06] MustardTiger: For the time being, it's probably not necessary,
[2704.38] MustardTiger: but it might be nice to do that.
[2707.98] MustardTiger: I think the vast majority of folks won't notice it
[2710.3] MustardTiger: unless you're doing some real close formation chases.
[2713.9] MustardTiger: And at that point, I think you know where the person is, right?
[2718.22] Stephen: Absolutely.
[2720.14] Stephen: Yeah, it's really, I imagine, useful in those kind of setups
[2723.02] Stephen: where, okay, we've all taken off.
[2725.58] Stephen: Where did everyone go?
[2727.82] Stephen: Before you got people in visual.
[2731.18] Stephen: Exactly.
[2731.66] Stephen: Yeah.
[2732.54] Frank: The only time is if someone's really on their tail,
[2735.74] Frank: maybe it can be nice to the right behind you.
[2738.62] MustardTiger: I will also say that.
[2739.66] MustardTiger: Yeah, that brings up a really good point, Frank.
[2743.66] MustardTiger: A place where I've found it extremely useful
[2745.74] MustardTiger: is when somebody is following me very closely
[2748.22] MustardTiger: or say staying right off my port side flank.
[2752.38] MustardTiger: And I need to know how to fly in such a way
[2754.06] MustardTiger: that I'm not going to get into their flight path.
[2757.74] MustardTiger: I no longer have to ask them, hey, where are you?
[2759.82] MustardTiger: Are you off my right wing?
[2760.78] MustardTiger: Are you off my tail, right?
[2761.82] MustardTiger: And try and get the synchronization.
[2763.18] MustardTiger: I can look at my OSD elements and say, cool,
[2765.02] MustardTiger: they're off my right side.
[2765.98] MustardTiger: I'll make a left turn coming up.
[2767.18] MustardTiger: They're like, ooh, 10 meters off my right side.
[2769.74] MustardTiger: Ooh, okay.
[2771.98] MustardTiger: Yeah, it's when you start getting down into the single digit
[2774.86] MustardTiger: and you can see the decimal place, 9.7 meters, 8.5 meters.
[2778.62] MustardTiger: Okay, yeah, we're getting close.
[2780.06] Stephen: That's enough.
[2780.62] Stephen: Yeah.
[2781.66] Stephen: So you've done a heck of a lot with this so far.
[2783.9] Stephen: There's a lot of features that have kind of come out
[2786.54] Stephen: of left field that people weren't expecting,
[2788.46] Stephen: which is fantastic.
[2789.82] Stephen: But where do you take it next?
[2792.38] Stephen: Where do you see the project going?
[2794.62] MustardTiger: It's a wonderful question.
[2796.94] MustardTiger: My hope is to sort of get it easier to use.
[2801.34] MustardTiger: We talked about a couple of things that I'd like to do.
[2804.38] MustardTiger: One of the main things that's in the pipeline right now,
[2806.54] MustardTiger: and thank you very much to the folks
[2807.9] MustardTiger: who have been developing on this.
[2810.62] MustardTiger: Let me see if I can find the information I'm looking for.
[2813.58] MustardTiger: Yeah, so, Em Musk, you might see in the chat,
[2817.82] MustardTiger: has been tremendously helpful with a couple of things
[2819.66] MustardTiger: on information flight.
[2820.38] MustardTiger: Thank you so much.
[2821.9] MustardTiger: Something he's been kind of carrying to the finish line
[2824.14] MustardTiger: that I barely started and then got distracted
[2828.54] MustardTiger: into other things with is for people running F4 11 flight controllers,
[2832.7] MustardTiger: which only have two available UARTs.
[2834.86] MustardTiger: You want to use one of those for control,
[2836.54] MustardTiger: and then you're out of UARTs.
[2839.74] MustardTiger: Information flight wouldn't necessarily be feasible.
[2842.54] MustardTiger: And my thought is, hey, what if we do the GPS pass through?
[2848.46] MustardTiger: So in this case, GPS gets connected directly
[2850.7] MustardTiger: to an ESP32 information flight radio,
[2853.82] MustardTiger: which then converts the GPS messages into MSP messages,
[2858.62] MustardTiger: MSP GPS messages.
[2860.54] MustardTiger: That way you can use just one UART on your flight controller.
[2863.02] MustardTiger: If you're running, say, an F4 11, you can still use information flight.
[2866.78] MustardTiger: And this is really nice for those like three, four inch
[2869.1] MustardTiger: sort of iNav capable little long range aircraft, right?
[2873.9] MustardTiger: The ones that run off two 18650s or something like that,
[2876.7] MustardTiger: the Flywheel Explorer kind of class of aircraft
[2881.58] MustardTiger: that all run F4 11s, that's perfect, right?
[2883.82] MustardTiger: Be able to find each other on those too.
[2886.14] Stephen: Now, the history of MSP enabled GPS is fairly brief,
[2890.3] Stephen: I think it's fair to say.
[2891.42] Stephen: So do you think that there's going to be a bunch of fixing up
[2896.14] Stephen: on the FC firmware side to make sure that they're actually
[2899.5] Stephen: going to acknowledge MSP GPS updates correctly?
[2903.74] MustardTiger: I suppose there's one way to find out.
[2906.54] MustardTiger: Certainly is.
[2908.86] MustardTiger: Yeah, let's see.
[2909.66] MustardTiger: Do I have any sort of major plans?
[2911.26] MustardTiger: I've got a page on information flight,
[2914.14] MustardTiger: GitHub that says what I want to work on next.
[2918.06] MustardTiger: Let me see if I can find that.
[2921.26] MustardTiger: Oh, I'd like to do pass through flashing
[2923.82] MustardTiger: in the same way as Express LRS supports.
[2926.86] MustardTiger: So for example, beta flight pass through,
[2928.38] MustardTiger: I think is what the feature is mainly called.
[2931.1] MustardTiger: That's something I'd really like to do.
[2932.46] MustardTiger: And then the other, I suppose,
[2933.5] MustardTiger: the main thing that I'd like to do is do persistent configuration
[2937.58] MustardTiger: on the actual radio rather than doing it at build time.
[2940.62] MustardTiger: Right now, a whole bunch of settings are done at build time,
[2944.22] MustardTiger: which is slightly annoying if you want to do them out in the field.
[2946.3] MustardTiger: And yeah, my hope is to convert a lot of those to persistent storage.
[2950.62] MustardTiger: You go in the web UI, tick some boxes, fill in some fields,
[2953.66] MustardTiger: change it right there, save and reboot,
[2955.42] MustardTiger: and it comes back up with the new configuration.
[2958.14] Stephen: Nice, very nice.
[2959.9] Stephen: We're taking some lessons that have been learned over
[2962.3] Stephen: in the Express LRS project there as well, I see.
[2965.34] Stephen: Exactly, yeah.
[2966.3] MustardTiger: So I'm hoping to keep the build system a little bit simpler.
[2970.14] MustardTiger: I don't necessarily need to do unified targets or anything like that.
[2972.86] MustardTiger: But for now, yeah, there's a lot of things
[2975.1] MustardTiger: I would like to move to dynamic configuration.
[2977.42] MustardTiger: And that means things like turning on and off radios.
[2980.7] MustardTiger: There's a little mode where it will spoof some peers.
[2984.62] MustardTiger: So that if you're setting it up at home,
[2986.78] MustardTiger: don't have friends to connect with at that very moment,
[2989.02] MustardTiger: you can run a command and make sure your flight controller
[2991.02] MustardTiger: will understand when peers do come up.
[2994.14] MustardTiger: All of those things would be nice to get in the web UI.
[2996.22] MustardTiger: And that's sort of what I'm working on
[2997.58] MustardTiger: is the making it easier part of things.
[3000.54] MustardTiger: I don't foresee us having a proper configurator.
[3003.9] MustardTiger: I think that's probably unnecessary for the scale of this project.
[3006.54] MustardTiger: Just stick to mostly web-based stuff.
[3011.94] Stephen: Certainly the easiest for out in the field,
[3013.94] Stephen: which is Jack's preference, you know,
[3016.02] Stephen: does all his configuration when he gets to the field.
[3019.38] Stephen: They have Wi-Fi up for that.
[3021.46] Stephen: Perfect.
[3022.58] Frank: Not having to have another configurator to keep track of
[3026.1] Frank: and make sure it's in the right version to update
[3028.42] Frank: that particular thing that also sounds excellent.
[3030.26] Stephen: All those configurators, even people like TBS,
[3032.98] Stephen: they're slowly drifting towards web-based solutions anyway.
[3036.26] Stephen: Just a matter of time before everyone coalesces on that.
[3040.18] MustardTiger: Speaking of Wi-Fi out in the field,
[3042.18] MustardTiger: being able to connect to your aircraft from your phone
[3045.86] MustardTiger: and look at that web UI, it's silly.
[3047.3] MustardTiger: It has effectively no practical purpose,
[3049.62] MustardTiger: but it was very fun to stick one of my planes in Leuter,
[3052.66] MustardTiger: connect to the ESP's Wi-Fi and look at all of its parameters,
[3056.98] MustardTiger: look at the speed and everything from my phone.
[3061.86] Stephen: Yeah.
[3062.02] Stephen: Do you think people might put one in their radio in future
[3065.3] Stephen: so they could have one in their radio
[3066.74] Stephen: that they could always just, you know,
[3068.1] Stephen: connect to with their phone?
[3069.7] Stephen: Instead of needing to synchronize your GPS
[3072.58] Stephen: and wait until it's locked on before you take off,
[3074.66] Stephen: you could just kind of have one that's stuck in your radio
[3077.38] Stephen: and then you take off and wait for it to get GPS and you're away.
[3083.06] MustardTiger: I suppose sort of the sky's limit, right?
[3085.38] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3086.58] MustardTiger: I was going to say something about something I had planned
[3091.46] MustardTiger: and it's gone now.
[3093.22] MustardTiger: Such is life.
[3094.1] MustardTiger: Sorry.
[3095.22] MustardTiger: No, no worries.
[3095.94] MustardTiger: Sorry.
[3097.94] Stephen: You did mention that it's on your GitHub,
[3099.62] Stephen: so if anyone is looking for the updates on up and coming ideas,
[3104.66] Stephen: go over to Formation Flight on GitHub.
[3107.22] Stephen: Have a look at Mustard Tiger's work.
[3109.86] MustardTiger: Absolutely.
[3110.58] MustardTiger: Formationflight.org is the site that'll help you through just about everything.
[3115.14] MustardTiger: And then there's a lovely Discord.
[3116.5] MustardTiger: Again, the link is in this YouTube video's description.
[3119.3] MustardTiger: I'm Mustard Tiger there.
[3120.42] MustardTiger: Feel free to hit me up there and I'm happy to help you out
[3123.62] MustardTiger: with getting it set up, getting it sorted.
[3126.74] MustardTiger: Any features you want to see, feel free to shoot those over in the Discord
[3129.62] MustardTiger: and we'll talk them out and see if we can get them done.
[3134.18] Curry: Makes me want to try it out.
[3135.3] Curry: It's just so hard to fly on my own,
[3138.58] Curry: let alone finding someone else to fly with at the moment.
[3142.34] Curry: I am really no mates in my local area.
[3146.18] MustardTiger: I'm very fortunate to have a couple of local folks,
[3148.74] MustardTiger: a few of whom have dropped an inset high.
[3152.5] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3153.22] MustardTiger: Again, I don't know if they want me to shout out who they are,
[3156.18] MustardTiger: but they're in there.
[3158.02] MustardTiger: And yeah, they're tremendous, lovely, lovely folks
[3161.3] MustardTiger: who are willing to put up with my,
[3163.46] MustardTiger: oh, hey, flash this build right before you leave the house.
[3167.78] MustardTiger: Willing to do crazy things like stick a version of R2Pilot
[3171.54] MustardTiger: I built last night at 11 p.m. on their aircraft and go fly it in the morning.
[3176.58] MustardTiger: It'll go fine, trust me.
[3179.14] MustardTiger: It did go fine.
[3180.98] MustardTiger: I appreciate those lovely local folks who have helped me out with that.
[3184.34] MustardTiger: Thank you.
[3184.82] Frank: It's a high level of trust.
[3186.82] Stephen: Absolutely, yeah.
[3188.02] Stephen: Well, and not so local.
[3189.46] Stephen: If you're running like 433 megahertz of some giant dev board,
[3193.06] Stephen: they could be 50 miles down the road, sort of local, right?
[3197.38] MustardTiger: Yeah, so that's something I suppose is worth discussing on range.
[3201.3] MustardTiger: The original iNav radar chose some LoRa parameters that were chosen.
[3207.54] MustardTiger: I think that they may not have been the ones that I would have chosen
[3213.62] MustardTiger: for that particular use case.
[3215.62] MustardTiger: By my math, the original iNav radar on 433, for example,
[3220.26] MustardTiger: if everything is working right, should be around 500 k's, which is excessive.
[3227.3] Stephen: Hi, where are you?
[3228.5] MustardTiger: Oh, I'm in Texas.
[3229.78] MustardTiger: Oh, I'm not.
[3232.82] MustardTiger: So I've got a page on formationflight.org slash info
[3235.94] MustardTiger: that has rough location estimates, or sorry, rough range estimates.
[3240.34] MustardTiger: And it includes ESP now, 2.4 giglora, 2.4 giglora with different antennas.
[3245.54] MustardTiger: Ballpark, yeah, the 2.4 giglora I think is the sweet spot
[3248.74] MustardTiger: where just about everywhere you'll be reasonably flying.
[3251.62] MustardTiger: You can find your friends.
[3253.54] MustardTiger: You won't get dropouts if you go to a weird attitude and that kind of thing.
[3258.1] Stephen: Yeah, 433 seems like the proverbial sledgehammer to crack this problem.
[3266.18] Stephen: It's a whole lot of range.
[3268.34] MustardTiger: It is on that note, completely unrelated formation flight,
[3272.58] MustardTiger: but I have been making some true diversity 433 radios for first best LRS.
[3280.74] MustardTiger: It's absurd.
[3281.78] MustardTiger: It's silly.
[3282.26] MustardTiger: I've got a couple of them on the desk here and I still need to flight test them.
[3286.02] MustardTiger: But yeah, 433 is done with modern day protocols.
[3290.98] Stephen: These have a 50 minute max out like special legal dispensation.
[3295.54] Stephen: Fly not just beyond visual line of sight,
[3297.94] Stephen: but possibly in a completely different legal jurisdiction.
[3301.06] Stephen: Exactly.
[3301.78] MustardTiger: Yeah, these these ones I have in front of me are only 50 milliwatt max power.
[3305.86] MustardTiger: And by the math, they should be able to exceed 400 k's very easily,
[3309.86] MustardTiger: which I don't know what what we fly that could hit that, but I don't know.
[3316.74] Frank: I feel like in the UK, at least just the amount of just noise of other things on 433
[3323.62] Frank: probably means that that's going to be the bigger limitation than just the
[3329.62] Frank: penetration, the broadcast of that signal.
[3333.38] MustardTiger: Quite possibly.
[3334.18] MustardTiger: Yeah, it's it's real silly.
[3336.02] MustardTiger: The antennas are huge.
[3337.7] MustardTiger: A lot of folks were using 433 for on every radar
[3342.34] MustardTiger: because the parameters chosen and the way that they worked,
[3344.82] MustardTiger: even though it should have had super long range.
[3348.1] MustardTiger: It felt a lot shorter than it should have been essentially is the way I'll say it.
[3353.62] MustardTiger: A lot of folks were suggested to use 433.
[3356.02] MustardTiger: I would really not recommend that anymore with information flight.
[3359.14] MustardTiger: Stick with 24 Laura or ESP now.
[3361.14] MustardTiger: That is that's the way to go.
[3362.42] Stephen: That's straight up double the size for your crossfire antenna to get down to 433.
[3366.98] Stephen: All three people who want dipoles this big stuck to their planes.
[3370.9] Stephen: How big is your plane?
[3372.5] Stephen: Not big enough.
[3374.1] MustardTiger: Bigger antenna.
[3375.22] MustardTiger: It's better, man.
[3375.86] MustardTiger: That's how it works.
[3378.34] Frank: Yeah, for flying information with someone on the other side of the planet.
[3381.7] Stephen: Yeah, hey, you'll find each other.
[3385.29] Stephen: That's that's the goal.
[3386.33] Stephen: I'm just wondering about when do you hit an overflow error on USD elements?
[3389.53] Stephen: That's going to be the problem, isn't it?
[3391.37] MustardTiger: In testing, it's it's surprisingly good about it.
[3395.77] MustardTiger: A lot of times, you know, during testing, I'd initialize the aircraft at like zero, zero,
[3399.85] MustardTiger: and then spoof appear, you know, where I'm where I'm actually sitting in the P&W
[3403.69] MustardTiger: or bring up a real peer in the P&W.
[3405.77] MustardTiger: And, you know, before I added guards to prevent coming up at zero, zero,
[3409.61] MustardTiger: I think it's 7000 k's or 13,000.
[3412.33] MustardTiger: I forget what the exact number is.
[3413.69] MustardTiger: Some absurd amount of distance.
[3415.77] MustardTiger: And already pilot did a tremendous job of handling us displaying that distance.
[3421.53] MustardTiger: Fantastic.
[3422.89] Stephen: Well, that builds some faith.
[3424.25] Stephen: That's good.
[3424.81] Stephen: Absolutely.
[3425.29] Stephen: Yeah.
[3427.69] Stephen: Yeah.
[3427.93] Stephen: Mark C, who was appearing before, I think a blacky FPV,
[3432.65] Stephen: he was on here before discussing flying via 3G and 4G modems.
[3437.21] Stephen: So that would be a perfect accompaniment, I feel, for these ludicrous range handsets.
[3442.49] MustardTiger: There you go.
[3443.21] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3443.45] MustardTiger: I've run run your 433 megahertz 4G video.
[3446.97] Curry: There you go.
[3448.01] Curry: I mean, you might have to be up quite high to avoid the curvature of the earth and stuff,
[3452.09] Curry: but you're probably in all sorts of trouble already for going that far out.
[3456.09] Stephen: He had a neat little lap that was doing telemetry on the web,
[3459.13] Stephen: I think, didn't he?
[3459.93] Stephen: Well, there are 3G and 4G radios.
[3462.01] Stephen: That was kind of cool.
[3464.89] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3465.29] MustardTiger: So, oh, I do actually remember what I wanted to discuss a few minutes ago.
[3469.61] MustardTiger: Something else that was sort of in vestigial stages back in the iNav radar days
[3475.21] MustardTiger: was connecting one of your modems, one of your iNav, the formation flight radio,
[3481.45] MustardTiger: whatever we want to call them, beacon nodes.
[3484.01] MustardTiger: That's a good term.
[3485.85] MustardTiger: Connecting one of your beacon nodes to a ground station
[3488.33] MustardTiger: and then being able to show everybody's position.
[3490.57] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3491.85] MustardTiger: I've got that loosely working.
[3494.33] MustardTiger: It kind of sort of works.
[3496.57] MustardTiger: There's still a lot of stuff to be done,
[3498.01] MustardTiger: but the hope is to be able to feed all of that data into mission planner.
[3501.77] MustardTiger: Don't have to be running autopilot.
[3503.69] MustardTiger: It spoofs six aircraft and speaks MavLink over UDP,
[3507.61] MustardTiger: so you just connect to the Wi-Fi of one beacon,
[3511.13] MustardTiger: and then you can sit there on the ground and have everybody on a map.
[3514.17] Stephen: That's cool.
[3514.81] Stephen: So, if someone's taking a break and they're not wearing goggles or whatever,
[3518.73] Stephen: they can just sidle over to a laptop and be like,
[3520.97] Stephen: I wonder where everybody's at.
[3522.81] MustardTiger: Absolutely.
[3523.45] MustardTiger: It's also nice for just spotting, especially on certain types of missions.
[3528.73] MustardTiger: You could overlay your mission planner with ADS-B data,
[3531.85] MustardTiger: just to be extra safe and say, hey, let's not go that direction, that altitude.
[3538.25] MustardTiger: There's some cool things you can do once you've got...
[3540.57] MustardTiger: ADS-B overlay would be a fantastic use case for that.
[3543.53] MustardTiger: Nice.
[3544.01] MustardTiger: Yeah.
[3544.65] MustardTiger: That already exists in mission planner,
[3546.49] MustardTiger: so being able to overlay your formations position with ADS-B with ground maps and all that
[3552.57] MustardTiger: could be quite nice.
[3554.09] Frank: Yeah, definitely.
[3555.45] Frank: I was even thinking about, I mean, it's recently been the FPV combat meetup
[3560.49] Frank: where they were trying to do the laser tag,
[3565.29] Frank: or there's even crashing them into each other as well as a form of combat.
[3570.49] Frank: And so, if you have all of them,
[3573.37] Frank: you can have some nice little kind of war maps of them all
[3576.89] Frank: flying around and crashing into each other.
[3578.41] Frank: That could be quite fun.
[3579.61] MustardTiger: That'd be fun.
[3580.25] MustardTiger: And then they disappear once they hit one another.
[3582.17] Frank: It's perfect.
[3584.89] Frank: Yeah, there's a lot of things you could do with that.
[3588.97] Stephen: Just need a little green OSD and get back to that kind of Apache gun ship look with all your
[3595.37] Stephen: friend or foe recognizing.
[3597.77] Stephen: Yeah.
[3598.01] Stephen: Last but with modern digital OSDs.
[3600.17] Stephen: There you go.
[3601.29] Stephen: Yeah, just flip it onto another page.
[3603.45] Stephen: I don't think that's dropping any day now, the red, green, amber, white pages.
[3608.81] Stephen: So look at that one.
[3612.17] MustardTiger: Yeah, but there's absolutely a lot of opportunity for features.
[3615.69] MustardTiger: Again, if anybody has any cool ideas,
[3617.29] MustardTiger: anything you want to see out of formation flight,
[3618.89] MustardTiger: feel free to drop into that Discord, say hi.
[3623.05] MustardTiger: Shoot me a message.
[3624.01] MustardTiger: We'll see if we can get something implemented.
[3627.45] Stephen: Awesome.
[3627.93] Stephen: Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, Master Tiger.
[3630.17] Stephen: Thank you so much for joining us this evening and telling us about a,
[3634.01] Stephen: frankly, fascinating project.
[3636.09] Stephen: You've done an incredible amount in what I think is a very short amount of time as well.
[3640.81] Stephen: Obviously, building on prior projects and due credit to INAF radar and everyone that's come
[3645.45] Stephen: before you, but huge congratulations on building something so impressive and so useful and so
[3651.21] Stephen: attainable to a lot of pilots as well.
[3653.29] Stephen: So thank you so much.
[3655.37] MustardTiger: Thank you so much for having me on.
[3656.65] MustardTiger: I really appreciate the opportunity to chat with y'all and hopefully get some more folks
[3661.61] MustardTiger: using formation flight.
[3662.49] MustardTiger: It'll be nice to see out there and see y'all in my OSD.
[3666.41] Stephen: Awesome.
[3666.97] Stephen: Well, yeah, we'll be seeing Master Tiger on OSD in the near future, I'm sure,
[3672.17] Stephen: blasting out on 433 megahertz across the waves.
[3675.85] Stephen: All right.
[3677.29] Stephen: You have been joined by Andrew slash Frank.
[3681.05] Frank: Bye.
[3682.73] Stephen: Everyone's favorite, Curry Kitten.
[3684.97] Stephen: I'm Dan Hinnah.
[3685.93] Stephen: Bye.
[3687.13] Stephen: And Jack, who's just dropped.
[3689.53] Stephen: Thank you very much, Jack.
[3691.53] Jack: Hello.
[3692.25] Jack: I didn't say anything the whole show.
[3700.17] Stephen: And of course, by our fantastic guest, Master Tiger.
[3703.69] Stephen: Thank you so much for joining us.
[3705.37] Stephen: Again, thank y'all for having me.
[3707.13] Stephen: All right.
[3708.01] Stephen: Have a good day or evening wherever you are.
[3710.01] Stephen: Catch you next week.
[3711.29] Stephen: Thank you, Patreons.
[3712.89] Stephen: Thank you, our wonderful Patreons, for enabling us to do this,
[3715.53] Stephen: keeping the websites online, paying the editor,
[3717.93] Stephen: and 1,000 other useful things that make the show happen and keep the wheels on.
[3723.21] Stephen: Thank you so much.
[3724.33] Stephen: You're awesome.
[3725.53] Stephen: Look at patreon.org.
[3726.73] Stephen: Let's drone out to become a Patreon where you can pay to edit the show,
[3730.89] Stephen: get your name in the credits, et cetera.
[3734.17] Stephen: I don't know.
[3738.49] Stephen: Is it patreon.com?
[3740.57] Frank: patreon.com.
[3746.25] Stephen: And on that note of failure and lack of accomplishment,
[3750.41] Stephen: it's another episode of Let's Drone Out in the camera.
[3753.37] Stephen: I think patreon.org is some dodgy fishing site.
[3755.69] Curry: It's just a little bit too.
[3758.49] MustardTiger: Hey, as long as we're sitting here, I'll shout out formationflight.org.
[3761.53] MustardTiger: That one is a .org.
[3762.97] UNKNOWN: Telemetry lost.