GroundControl and MAVLink have been improved substantially behind the scenes over the last months. The most obvious new feature on the user level are custom user widgets. You can configure yourself parameter sliders and buttons and even export this widget into a *.qgw file, which other users can import. The video shows how to create a custom attitude control…

The MAVLink mailing list is currently very actively discussing which route to take to CAN-MAVLink integration. Especially engineers working in their day jobs on ARINC 825 or CANaerospace could bring important feedback to the table, so please share your knowledge.…

The design we pioneered in 2009 for machine vision with Gumstix Overo is now finally available as product from Gumstix. They did a great job of converting our initial raw open source design into a usable product, our internal prototype made it not beyond basic sensor readout routines. The picture on the top shows the…

This video shows how each user can configure the layout and even individual sliders and buttons of QGroundControl for his personal needs. This version is compatible with the current ArduPilotMega pre-release 2.0 codebase from the SVN repository (trunk). Please note that the video shows only a snapshot, not the final QGroundControl 0.8.3 release version (we're still improving it on a daily basis). User feedback is very welcome, if you want to try it yourself you can…

QGroundControl is currently improved on a daily basis along with the efforts to implement a common mission interface for ArduPilotMega and MAVLink. While this is work in progress, I'd like to share some impressions of the new features. Once the next APM version is released, a matching stable version of QGC…

From 0.7.7 to 0.8.0 QGroundControl got many new features and bugfixes, it's impossible to fit all of them into one post. We will therefore run a small blog post series over the next few days to cover them. An experimental release is already available for Windows and Mac OS, so you can try it…

It was just one of these casual quick hacks (about 10 lines of code), but QGroundControl now also allows to use Google Earth for visualization, including the new…

The QGroundControl dev team is currently hard working on the integration of more autopilots and the 3D outdoor view. In line with these efforts we would like to add more CAD models of airplanes, helicopters and other MAVs to allow users to select a CAD model close to their aircraft.

If you have a CAD file…

We were already using the Gumstix Overo COM in our winning EMAV 2009 entry. Other projects have started to adapt the system design with Linux onboard computer. It separates the Linux computer vision system and control/estimation code running on an external microcontroller. At that time we already did the electronics design…

We proudly announce the launch of the pxIMU Autopilot! The boards, which are priced at 400 chf (about $420) each, will only be made in batches of at least 30, so when we get that many orders we'll put them into production. We have also released the…