3 The first thing to do after you open the box is to hook up a
4 battery and charge it if necessary.
8 For TeleMetrum, TeleMega and EasyMega, the battery can be charged by plugging it into the
9 corresponding socket of the device and then using the USB
10 cable to plug the flight computer into your computer's USB socket. The
11 on-board circuitry will charge the battery whenever it is plugged
12 in, because the on-off switch does NOT control the
14 The Lithium Polymer TeleMini and EasyMini battery can be charged by
15 disconnecting it from the board and plugging it into a
16 standalone battery charger such as the LipoCharger product
17 included in TeleMini Starter Kits, and connecting that via a USB
18 cable to a laptop or other USB power source.
20 You can also choose to use another battery with TeleMini v2.0
21 and EasyMini, anything supplying between 4 and 12 volts should
22 work fine (like a standard 9V battery), but if you are planning
23 to fire pyro charges, ground testing is required to verify that
24 the battery supplies enough current to fire your chosen e-matches.
28 On TeleMetrum v1 boards, when the GPS chip is initially
29 searching for satellites, TeleMetrum will consume more current
30 than it pulls from the USB port, so the battery must be
31 attached in order to get satellite lock. Once GPS is locked,
32 the current consumption goes back down enough to enable charging
33 while running. So it's a good idea to fully charge the battery
34 as your first item of business so there is no issue getting and
35 maintaining satellite lock. The yellow charge indicator led
36 will go out when the battery is nearly full and the charger goes
37 to trickle charge. It can take several hours to fully recharge a
38 deeply discharged battery.
40 TeleMetrum v2.0, TeleMega and EasyMega use a higher power battery charger,
41 allowing them to charge the battery while running the board at
42 maximum power. When the battery is charging, or when the board
43 is consuming a lot of power, the red LED will be lit. When the
44 battery is fully charged, the green LED will be lit. When the
45 battery is damaged or missing, both LEDs will be lit, which
49 === Ground Station Hardware
51 There are two ground stations available, the TeleDongle USB to
52 RF interface and the TeleBT Bluetooth/USB to RF interface. If
53 you plug either of these in to your Mac or Linux computer it should
54 “just work”, showing up as a serial port device. Windows systems need
55 driver information that is part of the AltOS download to know that the
56 existing USB modem driver will work. We therefore recommend installing
57 our software before plugging in TeleDongle if you are using a Windows
58 computer. If you are using an older version of Linux and are having
59 problems, try moving to a fresher kernel (2.6.33 or
62 === Linux/Mac/Windows Ground Station Software
64 Next you should obtain and install the AltOS software.
65 The AltOS distribution includes the AltosUI ground
66 station program, current firmware images for all of
67 the hardware, and a number of standalone utilities
68 that are rarely needed. Pre-built binary packages are
69 available for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX. Full
70 source code and build instructions are also
71 available. The latest version may always be downloaded
72 from http://altusmetrum.org/AltOS
74 === Android Ground Station Software
76 TeleBT can also connect to an Android device over
78 link:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.altusmetrum.AltosDroid[AltosDroid
79 Android application] is available from the
80 link:https://play.google.com[Google Play system].
82 You don't need a data plan to use AltosDroid, but
83 without network access, you'll want to download
84 offline map data before wandering away from the