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The Ground Agent is the ADOS agent installed with the ground_station profile. It receives WFB-ng video and telemetry from a drone and serves them to your laptop, phone or an HDMI monitor. By the end of this page a ground station runs its receiver and access point, and you have opened it from a browser.

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Hardware

Optional for field use without a laptop: a small display and four buttons (Display), an HDMI monitor (HDMI kiosk) and a USB gamepad. The drone needs the Drone Agent with a matching WFB-ng adapter. See Quickstart: Drone Agent.

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Install

Flash a 64-bit OS image for your board with SSH enabled, plug in the WFB-ng adapter, SSH in, and run:
The profile is chosen at install time, never detected from the hardware. Without --profile ground_station the installer opens its wizard in an interactive terminal; choose This receives on the ground (Ground station) on the Role screen. A non-interactive install with no profile installs a drone.
Mission Control Flash Tool board picker with the ADOS Ground Agent stack selected

Flash Tool with the Ground Agent stack selected and the board picker open.

Mission Control’s Flash Tool can also show the command: pick the Ground Agent stack and your board. Its command already carries the ground profile flag. Board-specific steps are on Install the Ground Agent.

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Verify

ados status shows the node name, the ground_station profile and the addresses the node answers on. ados-wfb-rx is the WFB-ng receiver unit. Once a drone is paired and in range, ados diag link reports whether the link is healthy. The full unit list for this profile is on systemd services. If you fitted a display, its link stats page shows the radio link, decoder and system state:
Ground station LCD link stats page showing link, decoder and system bands

Link stats page on the ground station LCD.

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Connect a laptop or phone

  1. Join the Wi-Fi network ADOS-GS-XXXX, where XXXX comes from the device ID. The passphrase is generated for each unit on first boot. Read it from the installer’s completion summary, the wifi key row of ados, or sudo ados network ap-passphrase.
  2. Open http://192.168.4.1:8080 for the ground station dashboard, or http://192.168.4.1:8080/cockpit/ for the on-box cockpit.
Over a USB-C data cable the same pages are at http://192.168.7.1:8080. See USB tether. For the Android app, see Android GCS. Before video appears, the ground station and the drone must be paired over the air. Ground Agent setup walks through it.
ADOS uses “pairing” for three separate things. A ground station normally needs the first two.
  • Mission Control pairing gives one Mission Control owner an API key for the node. See Pairing.
  • Air-link pairing (WFB-ng bind) exchanges radio keys between a drone and a ground station. See WFB-ng pairing.
  • Mesh pairing joins a relay to a receiver in a ground mesh. See Build a mesh.

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Next steps

Ground Agent setup

Pair with a drone and finish the setup steps.

Wi-Fi access point

Access point name, passphrase and clients.

Display

Pages and buttons on the ground station display.

Ground Agent troubleshooting

No AP, no video, or a deaf link.
Last modified on October 11, 2026