Fine day flying at Berwick 10/5/2013

Hi Matt. I'm interested in hearing more about your telemetry setup. Would like to do the same with my DX3. Also, if you can send me some sample telemetry data, I was working on an app to generate a flight profile from altimeter 2 data, but I scrapped it. However, I already have the x-y data to jpg plot code in place. I think it would be easy to retrofit the code to plot real telemetry data. My email should be in the member directory.

David
ps I got an ok video of your flight in Amesbury. I'll send you a link when it's ready.

Hi David. One of these days I will do a proper write-up on my blog of the details of the rig with schematics, pictures, source code etc.. But its pretty simple - the PerfectFlite has a data port that outputs telemetry data (altitude only) during flight. I connect the GND of the XBee to the GND wire of the data port, and the XBee DIN pin is connected to the TX (data out) wire of the PerfectFlite. PF and XBee have their own batteries and the whole thing fits on the altimeter sled.

The ground station is another XBee sitting on a USB adapter board and plugged into my laptop. So the ground XBee shows up as a serial device on the laptop.

Data is pretty simple (and documented in the PerfectFlite manual). It is ascii encoded, terminated by CR LF pairs. So might look like:

52<CR><LF>
106<CR><LF>
258<CR><LF>
etc.

The software running on the laptop reads from the XBee via its serial port connection and draws the graph. I also save the data to a file. I can show you the details at an upcoming launch.

- Matt