Hi Tom & the rest of the gluon pilots!
Congratulations to your Release!
For those who do not know me, I'm one of the head developers of the UAVP-NG Project.
I'm also an interested reader of Tom's blog for a long while now.
I just listened to Tom's interesting podcast about the GluonPilot where he proposed an open standard for a ground station protocol. I think that's a great idea.
I had to smile, when Tom described the problems of finding common ground for such a protocol... Even trough it will be not easy to design such a protocol in a way so that everybody is happy with it, I think it's a great idea to try!
On the NG we implement new protocols as new shell commands. A NG shell command is able to take over it's "controlling tty" and so can take control of the UART over which the command has been sent. This allows us to implement new protocols as simple as implementing a new shell command while keeping all other protocols (implemented in different shell commands) intact. The only shortcoming of this is that a client application needs to send a shell command first, before starting the chosen protocol. This means we can have as many protocols side by side as we wish, which will simplify implementation of a new protocol.
So if there's interest from your side as well to build a common protocol for ground station communication, we would be interested too.
We already implemented 2 different ground station protocols (one of them is considered legacy now) but both were not very sophisticated and were just hacked on the fly to get something working.
So a exquisite ground station protocol is still on our wishlist too...
Best regards & keep up the great work!
- Amir