The only instructions (http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/planning-a-mission-with-waypoints-and-events/) I have found for "How to prefetch a stored mission map" only shows how to save the map tiles - barely. It doesn't show how prefetching a map for an area goes on, and on loading until you hit escape. And it absolutely does not show you how to actually load the saved map after you have saved it, as the title promises. I found all the folders in \mission planner\gmapcache from clues given in various discussions. How do you load them for use?
Also, can you prefetch multiple areas and name the files so you can load whichever area you are flying, or do you have to go back home and start over for a different area?
I apologize if these questions are answered somewhere, but I can't find any comprehensive tutorial anywhere.
Thanks
Replies
With the computer on line I
Open Flight Plan tab
Zoomed to my interest place
Prefetch as everybody told. Aborting the process after level 19 was prefetched.
Turn off and on again the notebook
Then without any internet (totally offline)
I went on the same place and there it was the pictures up to the level that I aborted the prefetch. Beyond that level the picture loose it's accuracy and became blurred
For myself this is enough to go on a field and do my job
Yes, but 75% of our usage is in areas where there is no cell phone coverage. Thus we have to preload everything. Hopefully somebody else out there may have tried this.
Thanks for trying to help.
Hi Mark,
We need to assume there is NO internet connection in the field. So, we prefetch maps to office computer. Copy to USB. Copy to Ground Station computer, possibly in the field.
How do make Mission Planner find and use them, even though they are copied to the same place as all the other maps ?? It did not seem to work.
Thanks
Hi Mark,
Thanks for your reply. I have managed to prefetch maps of the area I care about. I took a guess that I had to copy these folders to next computer I wished to use them on when an internet link was unavailable. Unfortunately when I arrived at this place I did not seem able to access them.
If anyone has any more info on the copying and access steps of saved maps I would be grateful. Australia is a very large place and their are plenty of places we need to fly that do not even have mobile phone coverage !!
Thanks
So, how do we transfer tiles, or even a whole map from one computer to another ? Do we have to copy everything in the gmapcache folder ?
What if you only want to copytiles for a certain area ?
Thanks
@Jani, so sad I have to use this mean to reach to you, since no one at Jdrones seems to care about a package ordered and never delivered. I tried to contact anyone there in many occasions and never got a response (order 6426).
In fact, this this the second time I have an issue with items ordered at Jdrones and again, tried contacting you or anyone many times with cero response.... thanks in advance
Dave, yeah be careful on the size of the map that you plan to fetch... Even small area can easily be thousands of pictures and bigger areas millions :)
I wonder how many pictures there are in total on Google Earth that covers all zoom levels from everywhere :)
You remember that old story about Chess board and Grains of Rise deal??
"Sure we can have a deal if you give Grains of Rise to me, on first square 1, second 2, third 4, fourth 8 and so on and you will fill all 64 squares and then I will give my XYZ to you"
Total number of grains of rise would be: 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 pcs :)
Thanks everyone. Very helpful advice.
Thanks Dave.
Maybe I need to go offline to understand. When you say the maps are there - where are they? Is map selection only available when there is no internet connection? Does the prefetch map show up in the list of 50 or so map sources available in the drop down box (Google maps, Yahoo maps Lithuania maps, etc.)? Is the GPS lock what conjures up the prefetch map?
Thanks for the notes on the zoom level. I let a two or three acre area download for a long time before giving up on it, and I have a 20+ MBPS connection so I don't know how the guy doing the prefetch video made it happen in a second or two - or so it seems. Surely, somewhere, there is a complete instruction set or video about how to use this feature that doesn't leave so much to the imagination. If there isn't, maybe I'll make one once I figure it out.
Again like dave said, it's simple.. Just go to Flight Plan tab, Zoom to area that you want to pre-fetch. Click right, from popup menu select Map Tool -> Prefetch. System will ask if you want to pre-fetch current display area, say YES and say YES to zoom area too.. Then just let it download all maptiles.
When you go to flyingfield, There are NO any pulldowns or anything, Mission Planner detects your place/copter location normally and sees that "Ahaa, I have maps already from this area" so it will use maps from it's internal cache.
Simple as that....
If you someday want to delete or clean all pre-fetched map tiles. Just go to your Mission Planner install folder and delete "gmapcache" folder. This will wipe all pre-fetched maptiles and starts Mission Planner with clean map cache.
You need to do this for example if you have bad/broken or old map tiles from location X.
For example I had some old map tiles from our office location, in Google Earth I saw new rooftop at our building but in Mission Planner I still had old rooftop. Deleting gmapcache folder and restarting Mission Planner and voila... new map tiles appeared on MP too.
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