This week has been a bit frustrating, but it all seems to be looking up now.
After taking some test images with the UAV last weekend I realised that there was image fragmenting going on with the camera. This meant that one of the cables was either lose, dirty, or damaged. So, after quite a few hours of hardware debugging (cleaning plus some cable re-seating, etc) Im reasonable certain the ribbon cable that transfers the actual image to the tablet receiver needs to be replaced. I still have no idea what caused the actual damage in the first place, but thats a little beside the point. Unfortunately that means until that comes in the camera will be out of order. (…Charlie ordered two just in case…)
BUT FORTUNATELY, that gave me an excuse to take the whole camera gimbal off which means its time to fly without the camera and stress-test how much of a payload it can carry! *cough* I mean, purely in the interest of knowing our payload total for the UAV+CAMERA+LIDAR.
In other news, after setting up a physical router I was able to solve the uplink problem. Essentially it turns out that having complete control over your ports when trying to control ~6 different java servers worth of information transferring all at the same time is really useful.