Hello,
I played around with mission planner and today wanted to do my first camera mission. Unfortunately I clicked to update the apm software yesterday, which radically changed the functionality, so I had to think in the field...
Before I used GridV2 to plan a mission. I'm using what used to be called a relay, but is actually pin A9 on the APM. That is connected to an opto isolator, which triggers the Canon camera through CHDK.
Now, in the new version, I just clicked "survey (Grid)" in the mission planner and this seemed to work. I could load my camera there, input the altitude and it would (apparently) make a nice mission. What I did not notice is that the MP didn't actually insert action waypoints to trigger the camera. *sigh*. So no pics were taken.
Right now I noticed there's a checkbox "Advanced options", which makes some tabs appear. In one of the tabs the actual camera parameters can be verified. In the last one you can make changes to the type of the trigger. Looks like the default is a "camera distance trigger", which I actually used before when set to 40 meters or so, which then generated a valid mission. When I use that, I don't see any waypoints appearing.
I can also set this to "DO_DIGICAM_CONTROL", but I don't know if that's the same as "DO_SET_RELAY". Can anyone confirm it's acting on pin A9 and just pulses that for the set duration in the CAM_DURATION settings in the parameters? I expect this to be up 100ms or so.
So... the new functionality does seem to work better and offloads a lot of the internal calculations that otherwise need to take place. In terms of user friendliness, I'm not sure if people would find the trigger type so easily and whether the default is the best type of trigger to use (considering APM should know about how the board is configured, since it loads all the parameters. So why not use that?).
On the up-side... the mission itself was executed beautifully without any glitch. And the ground station allowed us to follow that from a telemetry perspective.
Replies
If you use the CAMERA_TRIG_DISTANCE option it doesn't set any waypoints because it uses the GPS data to trigger the camera at the set distance, it saves the waypoints for navigation.
You seem to have done everything correctly, after you created and written your mission to the APM using survey(grid) did you check in the advance parameters list that the distance variable for CAMERA_TRIG_DISTANCE had been automatically generated by the survey(grid) function.
Also did you set a servo output for your camera trigger, I set servo out for channel 7 in the parameters list to "camera trigger" and connected my gentwire to it and walked my APM along the ground and it triggered the camera at the my chosen trigger distance(38m)
Hope this helps
Martin : )