Just tested a few scenarios. Will do more to do tomorrow.
Have it working as intended (using Arduplane on one pix and Antenna tracker on the other) with 2x pixhawk, 2x gps and communicating via telemetry wirelessly the the antenna tracking pix using usb to the computer. Could use some tuning but thats irrelevant.
Then tried doing the same in QGC. Not possible because Mission Planner lets you connect and go back and forth between the two links but both show up, the tracker and the plane/copter/etc. Shows them both on the map as well and their heading and all that. As if you are controlling multiple vehicles. A bit like the older versions of QGC where you had active vehicles, etc and could select them. So, thats a no go as it stands. Also, it gives an invalid firmware version error (since around QGC 3 it is firmware restricted) and invalid flight mode (makes sense, QGC has no idea what these modes are).
Then tried using APM planner. Doesn’t work. Was able to kind of get both to show up, I could get the two pixhawks to talk but the GCS was going nuts.
Big part of it is on one hand it shouldn’t matter if we cant talk to the tracker. If it’s set up well then it can just run on boot. That is not ideal but it would work. The issue is that we need to access the vehicle in the air so commands and telemetry needs to be seen and received essentially transparently. If this were the case where we were using VBI to encode the nmea messages then it wouldnt matter because we could just go direct telem into the GCS but we have to bridge over. The telem is talking to the antenna tracker unit and while both are speaking the same language, they are using different dialects so its a bit of a lost in translation… Hoping it’s not too difficult to get both talking the same.
I thought maybe using mavproxy would be a test and use the tracking module to at least rule out then ill do all the tests withe the antenna tracker firmware on one and PX4 firmware on the other. That or getting the tracking module into mavros…