Entrant 62 : Airware Paragliding Collision Detection System
Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 9:53 pmUser
Phil Colbert
Description
Due to the growing in popularity of paragliding in the UK and the amount of pilots going cross country, the risk of collision with other pilots has increased dramatically over the last few years.
There a device to transmit your location to other pilots in realtime was needed, currently the only such device is too big, heavy and expensive, mainly designed for glider pilots.
The ESP8266 was chosen as it was very light, inexpensive , powerful and perfect for our needs.
Unfortunately its not completely finished, a 3d printed box needs designing for to hold our project and more testing, but it is completed and has shown to work perfectly in flight. The ESP is small enough to make mounting on a paraglider flight deck.
The ARF is connected to the ESP via the UART and the nrf905 is connected via the GPIO pins, see attached images.
Using the attached diagram the ESP8266 is the hub of the communications, the flight software LK8000 connects to the ESP8266 via WiFi and sends out NMEA strings, the ESP picks these up and formats the strings into a 24 Byte package which is sent out over 868Mhz frequency via the ARF RF Module.
Any other ESP in range will pick these signals up and then unpack the 24 byte package and upload to the flight software which in turn will upload the data to the flight software showing the position, height, speed bearing of the aircraft sending the data.
The receiving ESP also transmits out the details of the received pilots details creating a mesh network and increasing the already large range. ( 20+ km )
Due to the ability of the ESP to run in station AND Access point mode we are now capable of uploading our position to the web.
To do this the ESP connects in client mode to a wifi hotspot on a phone and then uploads all the surrounding pilots positions to the internet, also several ground stations will provide this feature when the project takes off.
We also provide the ability to pick up the current aircraft RF packets used by gliders and decode them to show the position of FLarm , the current expensive system via the nrf905, the esp will decode these packets and show the information on the screen in tandem with the packets received by the current scheme. The current FLarm system encrypts the data to be sent , we would like to have this project with no encryption so more pilots can use this project and more people will fly with the collision system therefore increasing airtime safety.
This project is currently being finalised and will be uploaded to the web and will be open source when finished, we will provide easy to follow instructions to build these units.
We have found the ESP to be a fantastic bit of kit, very reliable , quick and easy to use, when this project gains momentum we are sure there will be hundreds more ESPs used worldwide
!
Parts
LoLin V3 NodeMcu Lua WIFI Development Board - ESP8266 ESP-12
nrf905 RF Module
ARF Ciesco RF Module
Kobo Touch Ereader
BlueFly GPS module
Links
Homepage
Video
Images
Phil Colbert
Description
Due to the growing in popularity of paragliding in the UK and the amount of pilots going cross country, the risk of collision with other pilots has increased dramatically over the last few years.
There a device to transmit your location to other pilots in realtime was needed, currently the only such device is too big, heavy and expensive, mainly designed for glider pilots.
The ESP8266 was chosen as it was very light, inexpensive , powerful and perfect for our needs.
Unfortunately its not completely finished, a 3d printed box needs designing for to hold our project and more testing, but it is completed and has shown to work perfectly in flight. The ESP is small enough to make mounting on a paraglider flight deck.
The ARF is connected to the ESP via the UART and the nrf905 is connected via the GPIO pins, see attached images.
Using the attached diagram the ESP8266 is the hub of the communications, the flight software LK8000 connects to the ESP8266 via WiFi and sends out NMEA strings, the ESP picks these up and formats the strings into a 24 Byte package which is sent out over 868Mhz frequency via the ARF RF Module.
Any other ESP in range will pick these signals up and then unpack the 24 byte package and upload to the flight software which in turn will upload the data to the flight software showing the position, height, speed bearing of the aircraft sending the data.
The receiving ESP also transmits out the details of the received pilots details creating a mesh network and increasing the already large range. ( 20+ km )
Due to the ability of the ESP to run in station AND Access point mode we are now capable of uploading our position to the web.
To do this the ESP connects in client mode to a wifi hotspot on a phone and then uploads all the surrounding pilots positions to the internet, also several ground stations will provide this feature when the project takes off.
We also provide the ability to pick up the current aircraft RF packets used by gliders and decode them to show the position of FLarm , the current expensive system via the nrf905, the esp will decode these packets and show the information on the screen in tandem with the packets received by the current scheme. The current FLarm system encrypts the data to be sent , we would like to have this project with no encryption so more pilots can use this project and more people will fly with the collision system therefore increasing airtime safety.
This project is currently being finalised and will be uploaded to the web and will be open source when finished, we will provide easy to follow instructions to build these units.
We have found the ESP to be a fantastic bit of kit, very reliable , quick and easy to use, when this project gains momentum we are sure there will be hundreds more ESPs used worldwide
!Parts
LoLin V3 NodeMcu Lua WIFI Development Board - ESP8266 ESP-12
nrf905 RF Module
ARF Ciesco RF Module
Kobo Touch Ereader
BlueFly GPS module
Links
Homepage
Video
Images