Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Stephen Dade on August 20, 2012 at 3:56am

The mission planner connects to your APM via the USB cable or wireless telemetry. You can alter the waypoints and parameters at anytime before or during flight.

During flight, it will log the APM's state. This is useful for post-flight analysis, especially if you crashed and want to figure out why.

An Internet connection is optional - you won't get the Google maps images in the moving map though. I believe there's an option to cache these maps beforehand though.

There's a page for it on the wiki:

http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/Mission

 

Permalink Reply by Gustav Kuhn on August 20, 2012 at 10:32am

Ok, at some point you need to connect to the internet.

MP uses Google Earth to help you visualize the mission, set up waypoint, altitudes, etc.

If you are sure the mission is set up and loaded correctly, you don't need MP to be running during the flight.

You can "cache" maps of the area of interest beforehand, I haven't done it yet, all my flying is done with a 3G internet connection.

If you want live data on a laptop display during the flight, you obviously need some form of data link.

It used to be xBee links, these days 3DR links.

Any commercial(expensive) link that can handle the data throughput will do though.

I lost contact with my plane once, and only because I had live data, could I go to the last position recorded, and search from there. And found it, virtually undamaged.

Stupid me, never connected the airspeed pitot.

Permalink Reply by Jon von Weymarn on August 21, 2012 at 3:53am

i dont know the details of how MP caches maps but on the field that i usually fly I only once needed to give to laptop an internet connection to load the map. After this I have updated MP and flown on multiple other locations in between. Still remembers the field i usually use.

Permalink Reply by Rui Manuel Cravo Marques on August 21, 2012 at 4:05am

When you're online, mission planner downloads and caches the map at the zoom level you are using. If you go to a field and don't have internet connection, you may pre cache (prefetch) the map from the area you are going to fly, using the "prefetch" funcion. For that, at your home (or where you have internet connection), you select the flight area on the map using LEFT ALT + left mouse + drag, and when you are happy, click with left button, select "prefetch", then the planner will ask you what zoom levels you want to prefetch, that way you may prefetch an entire are to max zoom and use all the zoom you want away from an internet connection. Be carefull selecting too wide areas with max zoom since there will be lots of tiles and may take a while and some hd space.

Permalink Reply by Jon von Weymarn on August 21, 2012 at 4:23am

Thats brilliant. Didn´t know that.Thanks!

For me (so far) it has been enough when MP has automatically remembered old locations. As my courage increases the areas i fly in will also increase...

Permalink Reply by Lito P on February 22, 2013 at 8:42am

Strange thing on my laptop.  It's my left windows button not my left alt button.

And it's accessible only from Flight Planner not from Flight Data (which makes sense I guess).

so left windows button -> click and drag -> right click over area -> Map Tool -> prefetch - * make sure you choose a sensible zoom level....

Zoom level 17 took about 3 min to download a 5000 sqf set of tiles