The sky is the limit! Mwah ah ah ah... This occurred to me when I saw that the Teensy 3.1 weighs in at a lowly 2.5 grams, has a built-in CAN bus interface and costs less than $20. There's a user on rcgroups named
pawelsky who has been digging deeply into the CAN bus messages on the NAZA:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2071772
These are the data sets you get access to:
- GPS lat/lon, altitude, SVN, DOP, fix type, 3 axis velocity, date/time, etc.
- Raw IMU, accelerometer, barometer, and compass values as well as computed values for things like pitch and roll
- Speed of each individual motor
- Voltage
- Controller values including unused channels
- Flight mode
- Home location: lat/lon, altitude (barometric)
- NAZA computed inputs for yaw, pitch, roll, throttle (e.g. what the Phantom is actually doing to hold GPS position)
This can be used to program fully addressable lights, motors, a third party OSD, third party telemetry, data logging. I have done a fair bit of Arduino based SPI addressable LED installations so I've got that covered.
pawelsky was also talking about using FSK modulation to transmit telemetry via the vTX audio channels. Now this would be truly awesome! Someone would need to write an Android or iOS telemetry app. And then you simply run an audio cable between your FPV and your phone. Boom!
Now if only there were really small form factor 3G shields, you could have one transmit telemetry to a server in near real-time to act as a tracking system.