Exmaps's Posts (7)

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We have just implemented 3D playback with Roll, Pitch, Yaw animation on www.exmaps.com.

We feel that 3D playback will be much better than 2D visualisation. You do not need to reconstruct the flight mentally using roll, pitch, yaw graph nor figure out how did the drone fly via the 2D "spaghetti" created on the 2D map. 3D playback not only shows the path in 3D space but also animates the state of the drone. 
It will be easier to
1) see if the plane is indeed flying with nose pointing to line of flight
2) which way the multirotor crash
3) drop in height during flight
and more....

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There are some limitations:

1) Might not depict rapid roll/spin movement correctly 
2) Might not be compatible with mobile devices and older computers

Heres an interesting high altitude helium balloon plane flight http://exmaps.com/c835c8  done by LOHAN

Do give it a try and let us know what you think!

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Exmaps: Online Flight Logbook for Ardupilot Update #3

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More updates!

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1) Ability to input and save notes at the Loglist page and Log page

You can now make notes about change in parameters, upgrades, batteries etc. 

2) Facebook, Twitter sharing integrated in Loglist page. (blue slider bar) 

Posts to Facebook and Twitter will include a static image of the map with flight lines and automatically formatted text about the flight

3) Relative height

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Mouse over Altitude graph now provides relative height to take off height. 

Bug Fixes

- Mode for Tlogs 

Try out the drone logbook service for free at www.exmaps.com and let us know your thoughts at hello@exmaps.com

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Exmaps: Online Flight Logbook for Ardupilot Update #2

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First of all thanks for all the feedback .We have been busy improving the system and today I am pleased to announce the following:

- Support for Tlog, Log and Bin. We also unify the upload boxes into 1 but to do this we had to drop support for logs without GPS Week. 
- Flight modes for Tlogs.

- Able to process logs without account. We felt that there are people who just want to process 1 log or try out the system without signing up. So we have implemented a public log upload ability at the front page.
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- Auto scaling of data points according to flight time hence short flights will produce sensible graphs and long flights will have data trimmed. 

- Battery information such as mAh, Average current with ability to summarised by modes. 
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Total mAh is important because actual flight time is not dependent on how much mAh that is stated on your battery pack but rather how much useable mAh there is. There are many reasons why useable mAh is way below rated mAh.
i) Your battery manufacturer lied on the rating
ii) You are drawing high Amps. Ratings are measured using discharge 1C. 
iii) Battery is old
iv) Your personal rule for cut off voltage per cell is above 3.0v. 
Looking at average Amps drawn together with Total Amps also allow you to quantify the improvement if you upgraded the battery. 
We also introduce mAh/km information. We think this is important if you are planning to do straight line flights like drone delivery, mapping. What is important is how efficient your platform is. Ideally if you upgrade your motor/propeller/battery etc, your goal is to minimise mAh/km for the same payload. This is also similar to cars which use km/litres. It offers a baseline understanding of fuel efficiency between car models 

- Flight details such as average speed, distance travelled summarised by flight modes. Most UAVs are switched on (manual mode) but not flying hence data for all modes might not be relevant. Filter to the mode that you want to understand. 

- Error messages are now plotted on map and shown on log list page.

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(Map shows throttle failsafe error, later deduced to be 2.4Ghz jamming in the area) 

- Ability to download uploaded logs

- Ability to sort flights by date

- Improved UI and backend

Thats all for this update. The service is free at www.exmaps.com . I hope you give it a try and let us know how to improve. Meanwhile, fly safe!
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EXmaps - Online log storage releases update

Hi guys,

Thanks for all the feedback that was sent to us. We are happy to announce here are the latest updates:

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  • Support for Tlogs. 
  • Bulk drag and drop uploader for Tlogs. Description is set to filename, date from the Tlog data.
  • UAV limit removed. You can now create and store more than 1 UAV. Service is still free, guaranteed. 
  • Report Log Feature
    • Can report logs that fail processing
    • Can report problems with processed logs
  • Tabs in Log List, one for processed, one for failed logs
  • Faster load time for Detail Log Views
  • Battery data plot for Tlogs
  • Privacy policy is now available here: http://exmaps.com/privacy. This is important to us, I thought we needed to state as a service where we stand on this. 

We hope you can give this service a try and drop as a line at hello@exmaps.com. Appreciate the feedback and keep them coming!

Weiliang 

 

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3689595357?profile=originalToday we are proud to release the beta version of EXmaps.com. We have been working on it for many months and now we are finally ready to release it to the public.

What is EXmaps?

EXmaps cater to the APM/Pixhawk users. In short, the current version serves as a digital drone logbook.

You get to create account, and upload logs tagged to specific UAV so that cumulative data such as flight time and flight distance can be tabulated according to UAV. 

Here are some features that we build:

1) Calculation of actual flight time and distance

2) Presenting log data in interactive graphs, maps and sliders

3) Automated historical weather data base on time of flight

4) Ability to make individual logs public with comments function (otherwise all logs are private)

This is a beta release because there might still be bugs and it only support dataflash logs now. We chose dataflash logs over tlogs because dataflash logs is more complete and does not suffer from data loss due to signal loss. We would like to get the community’s feedback on this service before continuing our development work. You can register for an account at www.exmaps.com

Pricing

We are not certain how we are going to recover our development cost now but what we can promise is that we will always keep 1 drone worth of data free. Forever. Irregardless of the number of logs uploaded as long as it belongs to 1 drone. 

Why

We came from www.avetics.com and have been using APM for a long time. One of the things we would like to improve is maintenance and ease of sharing drone logs. We hope that users can better plan maintenance schedule base on flight time etc and better catch issues with the drone before disaster happens.  

A note of thanks

Thanks to Kevin Hester who created Droneshare. It inspired us to do EXmaps. Also thanks to the many developers at DIYDrones & 3DRobotics. 

Do give us a shout out at hello@exmaps.com !

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New 433Mhz Tracking Antenna

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While looking around for a 433 tracking antenna we found out that:

1) There isnt much choice for 433Mhz patch antenna 

2) There isnt much choice for a solid housing

So we decided to custom make one ourselves. It has a 433 patch antenna that fits onto RP-SMA of the 3DR radio. The radio sits inside the housing and the USB cable comes out from underneath it. The metal housing has 3 servos and a old ardupilot. It takes 5V and be powered by a 2S or 3S battery. The base of the tracker fits into a standard tripod mount. We tested it out and the range is much longer than standard 3DR radio with antenna and it works with the mission planner. We also notice the plane position on mission planner updates more frequently. 

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