Radio telemetry

Cool word, right? We hear it said by space agencies when talking about spacecraft that "telemetry is showing all is nominal." Nominal another great word. Telemetry is just data, data from a remote source sent to another point. In this case, telemetry would be all the sensor data from your rover (for example, GPS) to your computer via a wireless link. Conversely, data can be sent back. This is how we control the autonomous functions of the rover. You can think of it as basically a wireless USB cable that has a range of great distances (depending on the terrain and interference of course). The telemetry module we're using can actually have a range in terms of miles.

You'll need to use the same methods to join the telemetry module to our cable for the Telem 1 plug as we did with GPS. The main thing to keep in mind with the radio telemetry module is to keep it well away from the GPS and control receiver. There just happens to be a nice, large, flat spot on the front of the Pixhawk mount we made (as shown in the following image):