Flock questions...

[Rusty105]

Good afternoon,
I was directed, indirectly, to this project by the guys over at the iNAV-Radar project. As some probably know iNAV-Radar is a way for pilots of FPV aircraft to see other fellow FPV pilots on a 'radar' screen, thus aiding in finding your friends in the air for tandem flying. I am told Raven has something similar called "Flock". I am working on something similar for the Ardupilot ecosystem as well. I was looking to find what data they are transmitting from aircraft to aircraft through the ESP LoRa radios, but they said they were moving to use the same protocol as 'Flock' So here I am .

So, hopefully someone can help me out with a few questions, the idea is to have more users using the same protocol, thereby gaining a better hold in the hobby.

So:

1. What frequency? I suppose this is ITU Region dependent, but for Region 2 (Americas), I would think something around 915 MHz

2. LoRa radio settings? ( Spreading factor, etc...)

3. Probably the one I can find the least on, what data is transmitted "air-to-air". I can only assume "callsign", lat, long, alt, spd, hdg, maybe some others?

I am sure there are others, such as timing of transmissions, how often, etc... but the above will be a good start.

thanks for any help you can provide!

Rusty

[fiam]

Transferred to this project, since I think it's easier to keep the Flock discussion here.

Please, see #1 for my comments regarding the frequency choice for the moment.

The air protocol is still not defined, but I'm working on it at the moment. What I can tell you for sure is that the data transferred will be a subset of the payloads defined as flock_bird_info_t and flock_posvel_t in https://github.com/RavenLRS/Flock/blob/master/docs/FLOCK.md. Priority is to make the payloads over the air as small as possible while still keeping an acceptable precision for general usage. The less data we transmit, the more frequent the updates can be and the more simultaneous devices we can support.

[Rusty105]

I commented in the other post, but can I ask what editing environment you are planning on using for firmware development?
As far as what is transmitted over-the-air, probably wont be too much.

Also , what version of KiCAD are you using, I am using 5.0.2 and am getting errors opening the files.

[fiam]

I prefer using a build system (e.g. make or cmake) and an editor, I only use full fledged IDEs when the target platform requires it. The code I have written for this project is using a simple Makefile right now.

I'm using KiCad 5.1.0, but I think the files should be compatible with any version >= 5. Can you post the errors you're getting?