Ardudeck GCS

ArduDeck is a ground control station for uncrewed vehicles running ArduPilot. It connects to your own aircraft over a telemetry radio, a cable or wifi, and gives you a live moving map, flight instruments, video and the controls you need in the field. It is built for use outdoors, on a phone or tablet held in landscape on a controller mount, in sunlight, sometimes with gloves on. CONNECT Talk to your vehicle over USB OTG with a telemetry radio or a direct cable, over Bluetooth Low Energy, or over wifi using UDP or TCP. The last working link is remembered and reconnected on launch, and plugging a radio in can connect on its own. FLY A full-screen map with the flight instruments floating on top of it. Drag them anywhere, resize them, choose analog gauges or plain numbers, and set opacity so the map stays readable underneath. Arrangements are saved per orientation. Long press the map to send the vehicle to a point. WATCH Video from the aircraft over RTSP, RTP, SRT, HTTP and MJPEG, from a USB capture device or 5.8 GHz receiver, or from a camera the vehicle advertises over MAVLink. A flight head-up display draws attitude, speed, altitude and heading over the picture. Synthetic vision renders the terrain ahead from elevation data when there is no camera to look through. MISSIONS Download and view the mission stored on the vehicle, drawn on the map with its waypoints and current leg, and start or continue it. Mission editing lives in the desktop app. PARAMETERS Read and edit the full parameter set, with search, descriptions, units, bitmask editors and value lists. Download the documentation while you have internet, because on the vehicle link there is no route out. CALIBRATE IN THE FIELD Compass, level horizon, six point accelerometer and gyroscope, run from the phone. The compass calibration draws the sphere the fit is actually solving, so you can see which orientations the vehicle has not been turned through yet instead of watching a percentage. HAND IT OVER Spectator mode locks out every command so you can pass the phone to someone else during a flight. They can watch, pan and zoom; they cannot fly it or rearrange your screen. ALSO Flight log download, spoken alerts, offline map tiles for sites with no signal, light and dark themes, and a second screen mode that mirrors telemetry forwarded from ArduDeck on the desktop. PRIVACY There is no account and no ArduDeck server. Telemetry, logs, missions and settings stay on your device. Location is used to centre the map and is never sent anywhere. Map and overlay tiles come from public providers, which see your IP and the area you are viewing, as they would in any map app. ArduDeck is a companion to the ArduDeck desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux, which handles firmware flashing, tuning, log analysis and mission planning.