Background We have covered a few topics surrounding ATAK, including plugin development and how we can access data through the API’s offered by ATAK. In this post we are going to explore the on the wire interface, namely TAK protocol. Originally ATAK used Curser On Target (COT) as the protocol of choice for communications. However this has been augmented with a TAK protocol based upon the Google...
In my career I have both witnessed and have been part of many technical discussions and workshops surrounding the concept of open systems integration and the achievement of that with middleware. If you haven’t dealt with integrating systems beyond a handful of nodes and data types, it’s quite easy to fall into the trap of middleware not needed. As complexity grows and the requirement to allow...
This blog post has been written as a result of the growing interest in implementing middleware solutions around ATAK, allowing integration of third party system components without having to continually develop Plugins! See my blog post about soldier systems and middleware if you want a little background on the subject. I have built an ATAK Plugin that is fairly simple. It allows a MQTT client to...
As a follow on from Developing ATAK Plugin 101, this post will put some bones and sinew on the skeleton of our Hello World Plugin. I must make one confession upfront – I am not a professional developer, I can hack code around and make things work, but please look away if my code hurts your eyes! For this blog I will start where we left off in the previous example, our Hello World app. From...
Following my previous blog post – Build an ATAK Dev Environment, I felt posting a 101 guide to plugin development was required! The ATAK core software allows extensions to be built adding functionality through the plugin architecture. Unfortunately the documentation for the SDK is rather sparse at this stage, so I am hoping this and future posts will add to the community documentation to...
Background The Android Team Awareness Kit (ATAK) was released by the DoD originally as a Situational Awareness (SA) tool for small team use within tactical environments. The Kit provides a common moving map interface around which teams could co-ordinate when networked over tactical radio systems. ATAK was special because it was a DoD sourced software project that was very much...