There is no internet at my flying field. This means that ground control station or the APM mission planner does not show its location in the Google map which I think is one of its coolest feature. However there is good cell phone connectivity at the field. This prompted me to think if we can develop a small application for smart phone/iPhone which will at least show its location in the google map and some other relevant information ( like Throttle position, altitude etc). I guess this should not be very difficult. All we need to do is parse the Mavlink protocol and use the information to render the information in smart phone. I am starting this thread to collect all the information needed to do the job.
To keep is simple and enable quick development, I intend to develop the mini application on a PC first. Once done it should be straight forward to port it to a smart phone.
To keep is simple and enable quick development, I intend to develop the mini application on a PC first. Once done it should be straight forward to port it to a smart phone.
I have started reading the code and will post my questions here. I hope to get all the help needed. I am sure this smart phone application would be useful for other users as well.
Thanks
Replies
If you haven't used it already, prefetch is a great feature.
To prefetch map data, use Mission Planner while you have Internet access. Switch to "Flight Planner", and move to map where you plan to fly. (See attached screenshots) You will want to zoom to a level where you can see all of the area you will fly, or you can repeat this process to prefetch different areas. The larger the area you prefetch, the more data you will need to download, so keeping the area small will be a lot faster.
Start by drawing a box around the area you want to prefetch. To do this, hold down the "Alt" key, and click-drag to create a box. [See screen shot] Clicking anywhere else on the map will clear the box, so you can draw a new box if you want to change it.
While the box is drawn, select the "Prefetch" button in the lower central portion of this screen. Mission Planner will ask you to confirm that you want to down load each level of zoom detail, and each increasing level of zoom will take longer because they are of increasing levels of details.
When you travel to your flight location, the map should appear at all the levels of zoom/detail that you downloaded.
I hope this works for you. It is a great feature.
See attached screenshots.
Pre-fetch-1.jpg
Pre-fetch-2.jpg
Pre-fetch-3.jpg
the mission planner caches the map, so before you go to the field, use the prefetch option, and you are all done.