Ground Control Station

[flyingblind]

Just got into this Bebop 2 thing and wanted to extend my range a bit so I made a 4 watt ground control station out of a Raspberry Pi and some cuss words. I turned a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 into a software wifi router with 2 network adapters and OpenWrt - it extends the Bebop 2's onboard access point to another network that the controller/phone connect to then traffic is routed between the two. It doesn't require any modifications to the Skycontroller 2 or the drone or firmware to achieve 4 watts of boost; Everything is stock. Just connect to the Raspberry Pi wifi router with your phone & Skycontroller 2, power on the drone, and the router auto-connects to the drone. And it all runs off of USB power bank(s) for hours making it portable.
All indoor testing is complete and outdoor testing will begin in the next week or so as the weather gets better.

View attachment Ground Control Station 4.jpg View attachment Ground Control Station 2.jpg View attachment Ground Control Station 3.jpg

 

[bcow]

If you are still not satisfied with your range, give UAVPAL a try!

 

[flyingblind]

If you are still not satisfied with your range, give UAVPAL a try!

I have to chuckle as I sit here looking at a USB Huawei LTE modem I picked up off of ebay a couple weeks ago.. Looking forward to getting it going, the developer has a Slack channel and still offers assistance to ppl attempting to configure it. It also solves the problem of no protected management frames support when using Wifi - deauth attacks can't touch it. For a roughly ~$50 investment.

 

[bcow]

There is lots of support from the community, and Marc (softice) is a very nice guy to talk to. It has some quirks still and may lead to extra hours of configuration, but is impressive and absolutely worth a try! Have it on one of my Bebops and my Disco.