Over the years as things have developed and progressed I have used many but definitely not all of the OSD and OSD/Autopilots out there. Some obviously much more sophisticated, some extremely customizable and some plain and to the point.
That being said, the actual development of these OSDs have been much slower than the stabilization, piloting software and hardware and as it should be, it doesn't matter how good something looks, if at it core, it doesn't fly, stabilize or crashes.
I think though that given the widely available and relatively inexpensive hardware, a much more modern OSD should be developed, something open source but with the look and functionality of more than is available.
Let's take the minimosd, it is highly customizable and easy to do so. It is inexpensive. It is frequently updated and it works, plain and simple. My only criticism is that is isn't the most atheistic or "cool" looking osds, on the flip side look at the RangeVideo OSD, it looks great, is highly responsive and fluid and useful yet its customization is much more limited (although Alex at RV is highly responsive to requests). The eagle tree system is again, very good and functional, not as aesthetically pleasing as the RVOSD yet more customizable although not as much as the minimosd. I could go on for pages about this, there are so many out there. The one thing that is evident though is that the APM and soon to be released Pixhawk is ever popular and only increasing. I think the OSD is in need of an overhaul or at least an update, mostly from an aesthetic perspective but also hardware based if need be, the "smoothness" of the RVOSD is really unprecedented and there is no need we can't achieve this.
I know there is an "OSD Extreme" that will be released that is supposed to be APM compatible but again, I think doing something open-source and customizable, etc would be great.
No, I'm not a programmer...
I'd appreciate your thoughts on this. Let's make this happen.
Ryan
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Replies
+1 / Tom
Perhaps the next OSD wont be a hardware chip working on its own, but the overlay will be the CPU. With boards like the PI and so on, we are almost there.
+1
I'd really love to see a next-gen mavlink compatible OSD, the current one works but looks very dated next to the competition.
And if we're making the jump to a more graphical rather than character-based OSD, it would be great if it had enough grunt for at least some basic realtime image processing for research into things like overlaying ground features, a path home, traffic, airspace, etc. i.e. not just prettier numerical data readouts but graphical overlays in sync with the video signal
I can fully agree with that, MAX7456 OSDs was great and well served for many years, but it's about time to think about some graphic osd. It can be relatively easy built on arduino or pic platform.