Four ways to connect.

The ground node runs a Chromium kiosk on the HDMI output. The kiosk loads a local /hud route rendered by the agent. That route shows the live WebRTC video on the left, a minimal HUD on the right (altitude, airspeed, battery, GPS, mode), and a telemetry strip along the bottom. No taskbar. No browser chrome. It is a monitor that looks like a purpose-built pilot display.

Stick input comes from a standard HID gamepad. Logitech F310, Xbox controllers, 8BitDo Pro, a paired Bluetooth controller, any of them work. The agent maps stick axes to MANUAL_CONTROL MAVLink frames and sends them at 50 Hz over the WFB-ng uplink. Glass-to-glass latency stays under 70 ms and stick-to-servo stays under 60 ms on the bench rig.

On first boot the node brings up an access point named ADOS-GS-XXXX with a random passphrase printed on the case. Join it from a laptop or phone, open a browser at the local IP, and Mission Control loads from the ground node itself. The full GCS, telemetry, mission planner, and video feed run locally. No cloud dependency, no login, no account.

Multiple observers can join the same AP. The node handles the WebRTC fanout. Latency stays under 100 ms glass-to-glass when the observer and the node share the 2.4 GHz AP. Stick-to-servo stays under 70 ms when a gamepad is attached to the browser.

The ground node exposes itself as a USB composite device over the Type-C data link. macOS Sonoma and later and modern Linux see it as CDC-NCM. Windows 11 negotiates RNDIS as a fallback. DHCP hands the laptop 192.168.7.2 and the node sits at 192.168.7.1. A browser pointed at that address loads Mission Control over the wire.

This is the lowest-friction path for a bench engineer. No WiFi congestion, no chipset matrix, no driver install. Glass-to-glass latency stays under 70 ms because the path is a USB 2.0 link, not a radio. Useful when you need to rule out WiFi as a variable during a debug session.

The Android app connects over the ground node WiFi AP or a USB-C tether. On first join the captive portal opens for pairing, then the app takes over. WebRTC video plays at native frame rate. MANUAL_CONTROL frames come from the on-screen sticks or a paired Bluetooth gamepad. A chest mount or a lanyard turns a phone into a pilot display.

The browser path still works on Android. The native app exists because it gives control over the decoder pipeline, keeps the screen awake, and survives rotation and backgrounding cleanly on typical field phones.

A ground node can serve the HDMI kiosk, a laptop on WiFi AP, a Mac on USB tether, and an Android phone at the same time. Telemetry and video flow to all of them. But MAVLink MANUAL_CONTROL frames are single-master. The ados-pic.service runs a small state machine that decides who has stick authority.

The Hardware tab in Mission Control shows the current pilot with a badge. Any other client can request control with a single button. The current pilot either accepts the handoff or holds. Timeouts auto-release the claim when a pilot disconnects unexpectedly. If no client claims the role, the node sits in observer mode and nothing flies.