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New Pi-Connect Lite released!

We are excited to announce the release of Version 2 of the Pi-Connect Lite board! This board represents a major re-design, based on customer feedback and supporting additional use-cases when interfacing a Raspberry Pi to an Ardupilot (or PX4) based flight controller.

Pi-Connect Lite board

There are three major changes to this board:

  1. The power connector is an XT30, which are cheap and commonly available.
  2. There are 2x JST-GH telemetry ports for then dual telemetry is needed. Note, this is only supported on the Pi4 and Pi5.
  3. The power switch has been replaced with a power button. Use a short-push to turn the Pi on or off, and a long-push to immediately cut power.

The more under-the-hood changes include a complete re-design of the power supply, allowing for lower EMI.

The dual telemetry ports, in particular, enable more advanced use cases. By having MAVLink telemetry on one port for command and control of the vehicle, the 2nd port can be used for gimbal control, ROS2 DDS or any other custom UART-based sensor.

Pi-Connect Lite example usage with Raspberry Pi and Cube Orange

The Pi-Connect Lite V2 is available now from our store!

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Rpanion-Server 0.9 Released

Version 0.9.0 of Rpanion-server has been released!

Rpanion-Server is an Open-Source software package for a managing the companion computer (such as the Raspberry Pi) connected to an ArduPilot-based flight controller.

Rpanion-Server consists of a node.js-based webserver for the user interface and mavlink-router for routing MAVLink telemetry from a connected flight controller. There are also modules for managing network connections, NTRIP streaming, flight log management, video streaming and viewing hardware information.

Version 0.9.0 adds the following major new features:

  • Automated uploading of flight logs
  • VPN support (Zerotier and Wireguard)
  • Automated generation of KMZ files from flight logs
  • Timestamp overlay for video streams
  • Various bugfixes and ease-of-use changes to the GUI

The documentation and pre-built disk images for the Raspberry Pi are available here.

The source code can be found here, at GitHub.

Bug reports and Pull Requests are most welcome.