Controlling Splashdrone 4 with external computer

Hello all,

(a bit of background)

I have a Splashdrone 3+ and a Splashdrone Spry+ and love them both.  We've been using them to film Omura's Whales off of the coast of Madagascar.  Up to now we've been using a human pilot to control them. Now we want to set up a system to launch and recover the drones and use the Splashdrone to locate algae blooms on the water.  We would like to use the SDK to control the drone from a computer on the launch boat and get information back (images, GPS coordinates and gimbal angles) so we can analyze the images, identify the bloom and its locatoin and direct the boat to the right location.  We'd like to automate all of this so we can move the system onto a robot boat which will launch and recover the Splashdrone.

My questions are:

1. Can we use the 3+ or do we need to upgrade to the Splashdrone 4?

2. Can we talk to the drone directly or do we need to go through the controller (as shown in the SDK diagram)?  We would very much like to talk directly so we can simplify our control setup.

Thank you for any help you can give us!

Sincerely,

-Drew