Gareth,
I think having the GCS available to run on a small ARM device is a splendid idea. I've been interested in that since I got my hands on a beagle board recently. Having the entire paparazzi suite running would be ideal, but since paparazzi requires a number of build tools to compile all of the xml and c code, a more achievable goal or (early milestone at least) might be just to target the GCS and datalink portions (or maybe the datalink portion continues to run on a laptop and the arm device gets it's data over wireless LAN from the paparazzi server running on the laptop). This would allow you to receive messages from the plane and display all of the typical GCS data, but you wouldn't be able to compile any modifications or flash anything onto the plane if you wanted to make a change. Since these small ARM devices aren't ideal for compiling anyways (I mean once you connect a keyboard maybe you might as well grab a laptop) I think limiting the functionality to just viewing flight might be acceptable and would keep you from porting a bunch of tools and libraries. I'm new to paparazzi and know little about armel so I could be way off here.
You might drop in on the maemo and beagleboard mailing lists for add'l help.
You mention the use of GPS at the groundstation so wanted to take the opportunity to ask the group about that. Has anyone used a GPS at the ground station along with paparazzi to do things like compute the azimuth/elevation from ground station to plane? (like for pointing cameras and antennas automatically to your plane) How could a standalone linux application get the realtime airborne GPS positions from paparazzi?
Paul
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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:36:46 +0000
From: Gareth Roberts <address@hidden>
Subject: [Paparazzi-devel] Armel Port of GCS
To: Pap devel <address@hidden>
Message-ID: <address@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hello all
I am currently in the early stages of porting the main parts of gcs to armel along with packaging for debian lenny. I've got xmllight and ivy-c built up,but am having serious problems with ivy-ocaml, as the makefile specs the native compiler (which doesn't exist for armel). I have no experience with ocaml,and dropping in ocamlc doesn't work.
I am carrying out this port in order to ultimately run gcs on nokia n8*0 devices using maemo. I believe that it could prove to be an excellent ground station device. Once ported, the next step would be to 'hildonise' the interface slightly to make it more finger-friendly.
Further ideas I've had involve wimax and the internal gps...
Comments,suggestions,ideas and reasons this is stupid and won't work are all welcome!
Cheers
Gareth R