Custom Data Link

Other than Microhard and Silvus, also other radio links can be used with Skynode. You won't be able to leverage functionalities of the Auterion Pairing Manager but you can still get telemetry, control

To use a custom radio link, you will need to disable the Pairing Manager in AuterionOS and configure a few environment variables depending on the network configuration required from your radio. You can either override environment variables locally on your Skynode or you can inject them into the AuterionOS image such that all Skynode devices will have the same configuration.

This entire section assumes that your radio link is connected to Skynode's Ethernet port

Techniques for customizing AuterionOS

The following is a short introduction on how to customize AuterionOS. Fore more details on both techniques see the instructions for the AuterionOS' configuration process.

Temporary setup with override.env

To do this you will need to create a file in the /data directory called override.env. You will then need to add your environment variables to this file and reboot your Skynode. From this point these new settings will persist both reboots and updates. To disable them you have to manually remove the override.env file and reboot your Skynode. More details can be found on the following page:

Environment Variables Reference

Permanent setup by modifying AuterionOS image

Follow this section in the AuterionOS Software development workflow in order to permanently modify the AuterionOS image with your configuration: Environment Variables Reference

The Auterion Pairing Manager won't be running therefore the radios should be pre-configured before connecting them to Skynode such that AMC will be able to exchange data with Skynode

Disable the Pairing Manager

This is required because the Pairing Manager only supports the radio links described in the previous sections.

PAIRING_MNG_TYPE=DISABLE

Configure the Ethernet Network on Skynode

By default Skynode is configured to be a DHCP client on the Ethernet port. This is because the default radio link is Microhard, which contains a DHCP server that will assign Skynode it's Ethernet IP. If you want to give your Skynode a static IP then you can use the following configuration.

AP_CONFIGURE_ETHERNET_IP=<static-ip>
AP_CONFIGURE_ETHERNET_IP_PREFIX=<netmask-prefix>

The IP prefix is not the bit mask (eg. 255.255.255.0) but it's an integer value (eg. 24). For example:

255.0.0.0 = 8
255.255.0.0 = 16
255.255.255.0 = 24

This section is necessary because the pairing manager is not running so you need to tell Skynode what is the IP and PORT that Auterion Mission Control is listening to. This should of course be an IP in the same subnet as the settings from the previous section.

RESINCONF_LINK_GCS=<IP>:<PORT>

The default port that AMC listens to is 14550. So the following would be an example configuration to send MAVLink to AMC running on the 192.168.1.2 node in the network and on the default port:

RESINCONF_LINK_GCS=192.168.1.2:14550

Configure the Payload Manager

This section is necessary because the pairing manager is not running so you need to tell AMC at which IP it can find the video server to start the video streaming. To do this you need to define the network that should be used by putting the first numbers of the IP address. For example if your Skynode ethernet IP is 192.168.1.10 and your netmask is 24 (255.255.255.0), then you will need to put 192.168.1 in your environment variable.

PAYLOAD_MANAGER_GCS_LINK_IP=<partial-ip>

For example:

PAYLOAD_MANAGER_GCS_LINK_IP=192.168.1

Last updated