UAS Ground Station

A ground station is the screen on the ground that a drone operator actually watches: where the aircraft is, how high and how fast it's going, how much battery is left, and where it's heading next. This one is built for a fixed-wing drone. It draws the flight path on a map as the aircraft moves, charts altitude and battery over time, lets you click out a route and send it up to the aircraft, and works out where a payload has to be dropped to land on a target you pick.

You can try it without any of the setup. Normally it needs a simulated aircraft flying and a program running on your machine to feed it data. But it also records flights, and it can play a recording back on its own, so the live demo is a real flight you can sit and watch in the browser. Nothing to install, nothing to plug in.

The part I enjoyed most was the payload drop. Let go of something from a moving aircraft and it doesn't fall straight down: it keeps flying forward with the plane, and the wind pushes it sideways on the way. So to hit a spot on the ground you have to release well before you're over it, and the app works out where. It's rough and ready rather than something you'd trust a real drop to. My favourite bug had nothing to do with any of that. For one long afternoon no flight data showed up at all, because the simulator had quietly been sending it to my home router instead of my laptop. That and every other dead end is written up in the repo.