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Comment by igorvereninov | Hacker News Reader

This is completely different. Autopilot runs under Linux and that gives incredible flexibility. You can send HD video over LTE, run scripts in flight. SSH to drone in the air, how cool is that?

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Yes, SSH-ing to my drone and running scripts while doing low passes and tight turns is just what I need. Sarcasm aside, this looks really cool from a hacker perspective but I'm straining to find a practical use case. Both CC3D and Naze32 platforms are open (hardware and software), smaller in size, cost 5 times less -- but are, I guess, nowhere near as flexible as this thing.

Well, SSHing may be not that useful for those who just want to fly a drone, but it's quite useful for developers, researchers and enthusiasts. Compared platforms are way less powerful and won't be able to perform new advanced flight algorithms, as well as they do not provide easy network connectivity for 1080p H264 video stream from Raspberry Pi's camera module.

Not sure how different it really is.

I have to admit, as someone who is into quads (and embedded software) my first thought was that it would be cheaper to buy a $35-60 CC3D or knock-off dedicated APM module and then just add a Raspberry Pi to the quad as a separate unit. Having the two communicate is a bit more complicated but totally doable via serial if you're willing to hack on APM or OpenPilot code and a lot of the use-cases people are bandying about don't actually need the two units to communicate anyway.

Each approach has it's advantages. Navio was built to serve as a Linux platform for APM which provides more processing power than microcontroller platforms - it's useful for advanced flight algorithms (for example, a lot of new features of APM asuch as EKF are not supported on older APM hardware) and the level of integration between payload apps can be much higher than on two modules with serial link.

Yeah this is a good point, if you are tightly integrating the linux bit to the flight controller bit you will get some benefits here, I was focusing primarily on the topics other people keep mentioning like compressed video feeds which don't require that sort of integration.

It is certainly an interesting project, though personally I'd be more apt to buy/build a BeagleBone Black cape to achieve this sort of thing over a Raspberry Pi board.

How is running scripts (locally?) or SSHing into it over a serial modem any different from the scripting functions or telemetry information available with APM or GCS (CC3D) based systems?

What advantages would the raspi have in streaming HD video over LTE that strapping last years android phone to the drone wouldn't give me?

It is very different.You have a full Linux environment with multiple libraries. It is great for education research and development.

When LTE is not available you can use long range wifi.

700 MHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, a competent GPU - that's good enough for things like real time terrain image processing on the copter itself.

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