Looking for testers - Skydio x10 drone to CalTopo live tracks integration
My SAR team uses Skydio drones from our sheriffs office and we use CalTopo for all of our missions and training. I’ve written two utilities to make integrating Skydio flight tracks and CalTopo easier for me and my team:
1. export Skydio flight logs and import into CalTopo maps manually.
2. connect to Skydio live flight telemetry and import into CalTopo maps as trackable devices / “Live Tracks”.
Both utilities are designed to run on a laptop or a desktop. The 2nd utility can track a single drone at a time, and you could run multiple copies of this to track multiple Skydio drones simultaneously.
I’m currently testing an improved version of the second utility to run in Google cloud so that you don’t require a laptop to run the integration or remember to start the software while on a mission. This newer version currently tracks multiple drones (in a simulator) at the same time without any operator effort and it’s designed to be very cost-effective, only running the minimum resources during missions automatically. It’s more complex to setup initially, but so far “just works” when I launch drones in the Skydio flight simulator … we’ll be able to test this with our real-world drone soon.
I’m looking for folks who fly Skydio Enterprise drones like the X10 to test this software and provide feedback, especially around setting up and configuring it to get value quickly. This software does not work with any other drone manufacturers. I am not a professional software developer so there may be bugs in the software, you should be careful testing and using it, but I would appreciate any feedback to make it better.
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Update; my SAR team has been testing this for a few months, working great.
I’ve open sourced the code to the laptop/desktop version: https://github.com/billburns250/sar-drone-tracker
i also have a cloud-hosted version that is always monitoring for your drone launches…one less thing to have to remember to start/configure. It’s more complicated to setup initially (requires a Google Cloud Platform account) but is the version my team relies on.
Bill
I think you are on to something here that I have had a vision for at my Sheriffs department. I’m a pilot and we used the x10 platform and we run CalTopo for our SAR and SwAT ops. I am wanting the ability to see our operators locations live on the x10 controller and to be able to mark locations on the CalTopo map the operators can see and vice versa. I am wondering if this is your vision as well. From what I read above it is. I’m just not super tech savvy but have a good relationship with our skydio rep. Maybe you could lend some further insight on your plan to help us maybe get something like this off the ground?
Hi Jake - I'm happy to help. I have two version of this software that's been running continuously for my team for over three months now:
1. a laptop version you can self-run, which plots your drone's position and flight tracks in real-time to your CalTopo map. This is the simplest option. It requires that you have a Skydio Cloud account, enable live-telemetry access to your drone(s), and you have internet access. The instructions and open-source code are available here: https://github.com/billburns250/sar-drone-tracker
2. a google cloud-hosted version you have to setup once and then leave running. This is more complex to setup once, but then it's always running and automatically adds your drone to CalTopo whenever it detects it has been launched. Code and docs are also available upon request. This is what I run for my SAR team, since it's easier to maintain; it's been quietly running for several missions and training missions in Q4.
I'm happy to speak to you and your Skydio rep - check out the link above for the docs and code; and ping me if you have questions.
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