hey al, new here and having issues. Have spent the last couple weeks reading faq's and related 9 and sometimes unrelated ) threads and still have not come up with a practical solution to my problems.
First off, the big sticking point.. i do not like,use,develop in or support MS windows systems in any way
so have been trying to accomplish my transition into the UAS scene in a Linux manner. Ind a have been happily using Fedora ( recently upgraded to 18) for a year or so now and have not found much I have to resort to a windows enviroment for.
I am an ex Rc car guy ( think late 80's) and a dabbler in Arduino programing, an aviation mechanic for a real job a and about to retire and have some connections (fringe mostly...friends in the industry) to the commercial/emerging civilian uas movement.
my goal is to be able to build some largish (1/4 scale) airframes and get them operating in aa AUV manner.
To start out I went ahead and bought a APM 2,5 and connected them to some existing Xbee pro's I had around from my arduino projects.
the problems came when I decided to put the system in an old Tamyia RC car and get used to the software and such, First off I cant interface with my radio's ( old school futaba digital proportional systems ) no problem I though... Missionplanner supports using a logitech game pad. only not under Linux ( mission planner was running nicely under wine and mono on my fedora install BTW )
No sweat, I will just install Qgroundcontrol... a week worth of messing an unable to compile under Fedora, in a fit of frustration I wiped my system and installed the Current ( unpronouncable and unspellable ) Ubuntu system. yay Qgroundcontrol now compiles and runs ... but seems to send incomprehensible mavlink commands to my APM ( not surprising since it was kinda targeted at the newer hardware) However mission Planner is no longer an option as it will not run under either wine or mono now... complains of number of issues.
So in the next few weeks before I can afford to buy me a new 6 channel radio can some one help me connect something together, so that i can actually have a functioning rover just to use to work on range and antenna placement, and general familiarization with this whole scene?
any advice tips flames etc. will be considered and appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan
Replies
I hear your pain. I'm a Linux user and this is my recipe:
I have been using Ubuntu as my primary OS for 5-6 years now and also wanted to get the mission planner running in Ubuntu. I had Ubuntu 10.04 installed on my 64 bit system and had the mission planner running in mono and was able to connect to my APM 2.5+. I was able to write firmware to the APM 2.5+, and connect the mavlink. I have not tried any type of gamepad or joystick. However, I had problems with my APM board and got error messages about the compass failing to initialize and the MPU6000 failing to boot. Eventually, I decided it was a hardware problem like this thread talks about http://diydrones.ning.com/forum/topics/apm-2-5-no-dataflash-compass...
I am currently waiting on an RMA. Also, I had my Ubuntu 64 bit system on a raid 0 setup, and I just lost a drive so I will have to rebuild, but I don't remember mono being difficult to install. I also have the mission planner running on a 32 bit Ubuntu 10.04 netbook without any apparent problems, but I have not used that as much as my main 64bit desktop.
This rambling probably doesn't help you out that much, but it is just to say that it is possible to have the mission planner on Ubuntu.
Dan