I was wondering if there is a Mission Planner working group -- or is anyone managing the future of the mission planner?
Personally I'm interested in antenna tracking and possibly more voice commands.
Regarding antenna tracking -- is that feature in the pipeline or should I work to implement a stand alone tracking function using Heino's methods using a separate XBee?
The benefit of separate is not being tied to a mission planner, Happy Killmore's or otherwise.
But it does seem like a waste of a second RF modem, especially when moving to the more expensive longer range modems.
Regarding voice commands, a configurable trigger->message implementation would be neat. So you could read out status updates such as speed and altitude on a timer, or report more events then currently configured.
Thanks for listening.
Replies
I'm setting up an arduino board to take Mission Planner's output and point the antennas. So far I have some test code that is doing both az and el sweeps. It looks pretty as the antenna mount runs around but not too useful yet. My first step will be to add a setup menu so that the user can establish swing limits, then logic to "goto" any az-el pair withouth winding the cables.
At first it looked like a good approach would be to insert the arduino "inline" with the telemetry streams. It could watch for the Mavlink messages where Home and Current positions are set. This would be independent of all ground station implementations and would also automate the "set home position" function. Problem here is the arduino uno has only one uart. I suppose someone could make a semi-custom board with a larger cpu but I want to fly, not design.
I'm also going to take a look at the current Mission Planner output to see what is being sent and what the format looks like. It would be nice to see the Home position sent periodically, maybe once every 30 seconds?
Alternately, Mission Planner already knows Home and Current positions and could use the same routine that's in APM to get the heading between those two points. The elevation angle seems to be just the tangent() function. Then MP could send the Az and El data (like HappyKillmore). The arduino would only have to "point" in that direction.
Comments/ideas, anyone?
The APM base board is actually relatively cheap compared to the IMU and it has everything on it that would be needed for antenna tracking. A serial input and ability to drive servo motors directly. We could just write a special version of code that received the serial commands from the mission planner and let an APM do the rest. Would save on another Xbee.
Good idea to have a thread like this, where we could make suggestions for Michael.
My vote goes to tuning the cam stabilisation in the MP, without having to go into Arduino.
Otherwise, with the old 1.20 Version, i can not display it on my netbook, when i get to the flightplanner, all the zoom in buttons on the right vanish, but this may have been handled with already...
regards
Daniel
i have been looking into antenna tracking, but was thinking it would be handled externaly, i was posibly just going to output the plane lat/long in a customisable format, for a 3rd party item to point it. But this was just my first idea.
as for voice commands, what you ask for is partly already there. every 30 seconds, there is a status message, which is customizable. what else where you looking for?
Michael