Wow! I have been the gammut over the holiday season. I purchased the entire APM system and have been working with it steadily to get everything up and running. Just thought I would post my problems to see if anyone else is experiencing the same and could offer some ideas on how to correct them.
System consists of the following: APM main board, APM Oilpan IMU, and MediaTek GPS with the
adapter board, (2) Xbee modules are ordered but not installed.
GCS --- Happy Killmore Ground Station.
(I also tried the original Ardupilot Ground Station)
After many days of fighting with an EM-406 module transfering between Binary and NMEA protocols I finally switched to the MediaTek GPS. It worked with the Happy Killmore GCS but I was not getting a lock on the main Oilpan card even though the GPS locked on the sattelite itself I was not seeing "lock" on the ground station. I also noticed that the "Legacy" version of the APM ground station code would do some really weird things with the Happy Killmore ground station. It would lock on to the model, show my house in the "Google Earth" link but when I tried to click on any of the buttons for 1st person, center on plane or home it would beam me 70,000 miles out into space. (Also, the scaling buttons [normally associated with Google Earth] would spin around like a roulette wheel and none of the scaling buttons worked.) GPS clock was off by 10 minutes according to a Garmin GPS sitting alongside the APM. I also never registered sattelite numbers on the ground station. The original Autopilot Ground Station works similar but it is more stable with Google Earth. I can multi click on the land view and it will enlarge but the scaling buttons don't work like they should. However, it allows me to stay on the Earth as I manipulate the buttons. I even tried to redesignate the scaling from miles/feet/inches to km/m/cm thinking that it may be because of metric code but it didn't seem to change any behavior. Any ideas out there? I am puzzled.
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Is this a problem with APM 1.0 or with all the APMs?
I don't think the problem is related with Google Earth or HK GCS because if when I test my GPS using the CLI in test mode it says #sats: 0 just like in the picture http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/GPSInput.
Is this a Mediatek problem? APM coding? APM board? what about ublox?
After getting GPS lock (per the receiver) did you tell the APM to reset?
With the current code, you need to do a warm reset of the APM board to configure the MediaTek properly (this is in the manual). We'll be releasing a version of the code that fixes that tonight.
No idea what's going on with your GCS. It's rock solid for me.