APM Mission Planner now has voice and datalogging!

Another day, another spectacular upgrade of the APM Mission Planner by Michael Oborne. Today's cool new features in v1.09 includes datalogging, so you can record your missions from the ground and replay them for analysis afterwards. No need to download logs from the board itself; just click one button and you can record as long as you want!

Also, speech synthesis is enabled. No need to watch the screen while your UAV is in the air--your GCS will speak to let you know about waypoints hit or other events. This is a lot like the similar feature in HK GCS except you can't define custom phrases yet they way you can in HK GCS (but at the pace Michael's going that will probably be in by next week!).

You can also set the interface to English or Chinese for the growing Chinese APM user group. Note that the manual has also been translated into Chinese, French and German, all by community members! Yay open source!

Just click update in the Mission Planner to upgrade to the newest version, or you can download it afresh here.

Thanks for clarifying. So are linux numbers actually falling or just the relative percentages? It seems that as the site and community go more mainstream, then the percentages would also go more mainstream (dropping the relatively 'high' numbers of linux users we currently enjoy). I don't like to game statistics, but should I download the Arduino code in linux one or two times for every time I have APM Mission Planner download the code in my virtual machine of windows? I have meant to use the Arduino developers kit to try uploading the firmware, but APM mission planner makes it so easy (I setup a virtual machine just for this). At the same time, I don't want to be counted among the windows statistic as I don't have any windows machines (plus I can't take my desktop to a field).

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Comments

ken June 28, 2011 at 7:11am

Thanks for clarifying. So are linux numbers actually falling or just the relative percentages? It seems that as the site and community go more mainstream, then the percentages would also go more mainstream (dropping the relatively 'high' numbers of linux users we currently enjoy). I don't like to game statistics, but should I download the Arduino code in linux one or two times for every time I have APM Mission Planner download the code in my virtual machine of windows? I have meant to use the Arduino developers kit to try uploading the firmware, but APM mission planner makes it so easy (I setup a virtual machine just for this). At the same time, I don't want to be counted among the windows statistic as I don't have any windows machines (plus I can't take my desktop to a field).
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson June 27, 2011 at 11:11pm

Ken: I think you're confusing the code bases. The code I'm referring to regarding our analytics on the donwnload page is the Arduino code, which works equally well on all platforms, including Linux. Aaron was referring to the Mission Planner, which is Windows-only.

But to answer your question, Linux represents between 3% and 4% of visitors to all the wiki pages, on all projects that we've measured. The highest percentage is on this site (diydrones), where it is 5%. But in all places where we can measure, Linux use is falling and Mac is rising.
ken June 27, 2011 at 7:01pm

If the code doesn't work in linux, I would expect fewer linux users to go to the download page. What does google analytics say about the main page views, or better the APM / ACM wiki manuals? Maybe some day I will take some time to look at the code and see how easy it would be to port.
Developer

Michael Oborne June 25, 2011 at 4:35pm

Aaron, no, as soon as i added video and joystick that went out the window.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson June 25, 2011 at 3:23pm

Aaron: We have Google Analytics on the code download page. 75% Windows, 14% Mac, 4% Linux (rest is mobile). Linux is falling, and Mac is growing.
Aaron Curtis June 25, 2011 at 2:52pm

It surprises me that there are so few linux users, given the open ethos of the project. Was that based on a poll or something?
Aaron Curtis June 25, 2011 at 2:49pm

Fair enough, I'll get used to QGC and have a look at the APM code.
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson June 25, 2011 at 12:57pm

Aaron: I'm afraid we had to drop mono support to integrate video. There were very few Linux users and we do support Qgroundcontol, which is native Linux, so we felt that this was a reasonable tradeoff given our limited development resources. But the Mission Planner code is open source and if Linux users wanted to port it to a native version or one that works better under Mono, that would be great.
Aaron Curtis June 25, 2011 at 12:35pm

Are there plans to make the APM planner work properly under Mono? It's a total mess right now. I'm happy to help debug it, although I haven't done any .net coding. Going back to 4.x versions doesn't seem to work, maybe because my firmware is too new for it...?
Kirill June 24, 2011 at 2:31am

Yes, I know. I meant changing between "Status" and "Actions" tabs. Why not to merge them together on the one tab? Or even remove tabs at all, there is enough space at the screen to place all the info, I think.

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