I've been working on a HIL setup with FlightGear, APM and qgroundcontrol, as part of some prep for a 2011 outbackchallenge entry.
I've made a couple of minor changes to the trunk APM code that I thought might interest some other people. The patches are in a git mirror of the SVN tree here:
http://git.samba.org/?p=tridge/UAV/ArduPilotMega.git;a=summary
Most of the patches are probably not suitable for upstream, but some of them might be. The main ones are:
- fixed declaration of takeoff_altitude to be a long, otherwise it is limited to 330m or so (I was doing some tests with large takeoff altitude, and noticed some negative numbers).
- added a takeoff_complete check in calc_nav_roll(), or you can end up thinking your still in takeoff mode for a long time :-)
- force takeoff_complete=false on MAV_ACTION_TAKEOFF
They are the only real bug fixes. The others are minor features
- added FAKE_RADIO_INPUTS option. I use this as my RC hasn't arrived from hobbyking yet :)
- added configurable DEFAULT_TAKEOFF_ALTITUDE, WAYPOINT_RECEIVE_TIMEOUT and WAYPOINT_SEND_TIMEOUT
The other changes are specific to my HIL setup, and are primarily for debugging.
If the APM dev team does want any of these patches I'd be happy to clean them up and submit separately, or feel free to grab them from the above git repo.
The other thing I've been working on is a new MAVLink UDP<->Serial proxy for FlightGear HIL. The proxy is based similar in concept to FGShim, but adds some new features. Main feaures are:
- added command input (with readline) for common commands, like parameter editing, waypoint save/load, mode changing etc.
- works with current qgroundcontrol over UDP so you can have a a GCS running at the same time as the proxy
- supports the additional debug stuff in my APM git tree to help debugging of APM internals
The MAVProxy code is in git at git://git.samba.org/tridge/UAV/MAVProxy.git (or via gitweb at http://git.samba.org/?p=tridge/UAV/MAVProxy.git;a=summary)
Thanks for all the great work on APM! I've only got my APM board and IMU board so far, but I have a lot of other toys on the way from diydrones and I think this is going to be a really fun project.
Replies