Can't control gimbal tilt after Droid planner connects

Posted by Erik Graham on January 24, 2015 at 1:14pm

I was out today setting up for an auto mission (checking altitude of some trees, planning angles, etc).

On my way in to tweak the mission I decided to have the Iris follow me. Now whenever I connect (using Droid planner on galaxy s4), I am no longer able to tilt the camera using the dial on the Tx.  Before I connect, the tilt function works fine, but the moment I connect, no dice.  Even when I disconnect I still can't control the tilt.  I have to disconnect, land and power cycle.  

It may be coincidence, but this issue did not start until after I did the first follow me mission.  I also noticed that WP_YAW_BEHAVIOR was reset to 2 after the follow me mission (I had it on 0).  

I know I should post logs, but I've got to run and probably won't be able to do that until tomorrow night at the soonest.  Any theories in the meantime?

(My ultimate goal is to be able to control camera tilt while running an auto mission - something I thought I was able to do previously... though admittedly I'm still new to the Iris and still working things out - as you all might have gathered based on the number of my posts to this forum in the last few weeks)

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Email me when people reply –
Follow

Replies

  • Erik Graham March 2, 2015 at 6:53am

    @ Jeff,

    I am not aware of a fix for this issue in DroidPlanner2.  The work around is still to reboot your Android device.  I always land after a follow-me mission anyway, so that gives me plenty of time to reboot.  Its just a mild annoyance.  I prefer to reboot because I'm concerned that terminating a process in the Android task manager could cause other unforeseen problems.

    I have not tested in Tower (aka DroidPlanner 3).  It may be fixed there.

    For the record, I disagree philosophically with Michael.  I do indeed see this as a bug in Droid Planner.  It is not as if either of us are using an exotic build of Android or an unknown manufacturer's device.  We are using two of the most popular Android platforms on the market.  In my company, when we develop software we QA it on all the major platforms.  We often find platform specific issues, which we fix (or try to fix).  Often these are caused by some bug in hardware drivers, or a problem in the underlying OS.  None-the-less, we find a work around if we can.  End users don't care who is to "blame," they just want our software to work.  We spend a lot of money in maintenance - keeping our software performing without bugs as new hardware and/or new versions of the OS are released.

    DroidPlanner is free and it is an open source project.  As such I'm more than happy to give it a little lee-way.  Yes I would like to see this bug fixed (maybe it has been in Tower), but I'm perfectly happy to let the open source development process work its course. Bugs, issues, new features, etc. are identified and prioritized by the community.  I'm fine with that.  Its certainly resulted in a pretty impressive bit of kit so far.  

    • Jeff Weber > Erik Graham March 2, 2015 at 1:17pm

      I tend to agree with you Erik.  You said it perfect.  I think it deserves a little leeway

  • Michael Burmeister March 2, 2015 at 3:10am

    As far a I know there is no fix for this issue.  It's the tablet and not the software.

  • Jeff Weber March 1, 2015 at 10:26pm

    I am having this issue right now.  This is how I ended up on this thread.  Unfortunatley I broke my gimbal mount and have not got a chance to test it.  I am running a Nexus 7 tablet with the latest version of android.  I will try rebooting and do a force stop in my settings.  I'll try it before I reboot the tablet too, so that way we can deduce what is wrong.  

     

  • Erik Graham January 24, 2015 at 8:38pm

    SOLVED.

    Maybe this will help another noob like myself someday.  As a test, I connected to my Iris with a couple other Ground Stations - a Mac running APM Planner 2.0 (don't have access to a PC right now), and a Nexus 9 tablet running DroidPlanner.  When I connected to the Iris, neither caused me to lose the ability to tilt the camera gimbal.  I re-tested with Droidplanner on the Galaxy S4, and once again it knocked out my tilt control, requiring a complete power cycle of the Iris to get it back.

    Finally, I used the Task Manager on the Galaxy to close (aka "End") Droid Planner.  I should have relaunched DroidPlanner right then and tested it out, but decided to just go ahead and shut down the phone completely.  I restarted the phone and relaunched Droid Planner.  Now when I connect to the Iris I can still tilt the camera up and down, as expected.  

    So there you have it.  Moral of the story: Its probably a good idea to reboot your phone now and then, just as it is with a PC.  

    • Michael Burmeister > Erik Graham January 25, 2015 at 3:11am

      I have this problem too.  I reported it many months ago but it only happens to me.  I have an ASUS tablet that when Follow Me is used it does not shutdown properly and continues forever to send ROI commands to the copter.

      I even checked into the code and that looks solid as well.  There must be a bug in some tablets that make it unusable with Droid Planner.

      Original Post on APM: http://ardupilot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=9986

       

    • Erik Graham > Michael Burmeister January 27, 2015 at 7:10pm
      Thanks. Glad to see its not just at me. Did you report it on github, or just in the link above?
    • Michael Burmeister > Erik Graham January 28, 2015 at 3:28am

      It looks like Droid Planner starts an Android Thread to do the update position and later when Follow Me is ended it stops the thread but it doesn't and keeps running.

      So the issue is with the version of Android you are running and not Droid Planner.

       

    • Jeff Weber > Michael Burmeister March 1, 2015 at 10:29pm

      What did you do to fix it?

This reply was deleted.