ArduStation Mega v1.0b arrived

Colin October 30, 2013 at 1:38pm

Tom, do you mean bearing or heading? The bearing to the uav from the ASM is based upon the assumption that the ASM is facing north. Could it be that you're facing south? When we get compass support this won't be an issue. But also not everyone is going to buy a compass, so we'll have a parameter we can play with to take this into account.

What screen are you seeing a minus sign before the bearing/heading?

Colin October 30, 2013 at 1:32pm

Thanks for the pointers Robert. I thought there was something like that, I'll check out those packets. Maybe I'll see if I can get it to recognise the packets and get you to see if the values that come out look reasonable? (probably not til next week)

Thanks,

Colin

Colin October 30, 2013 at 1:30pm

Jani, what do you mean by your "main antenna tracker box"? Also, not sure what you mean about finding the pins.. I discovered which pin the voltage sense was on if that's what you mean.

I did have some ideas for hardware changes, I'll probably post back as I remember some more of them...

I think a third servo out should be easy, and probably useful. I'm not sure how we can control zoom on a camera, but I'd like to control bearing, elevation and zoom on a video camera from the ASM. This should enable some pretty good filming capability without a cameraman.

I certainly agree that the keypad could use with having a rotary encoder built in as it makes the world of difference as you say Paul. The exception to this is if someone has plans on designing a 3D printed enclosure for example, where the rotary encoder is mounted separately.

If you have no plans for enclosures Jani, a nice addition would be a cutting template in the kit for us to mark around when making our own.

I agree, the buttons feel a little cheap- I don't know if that's because they're the extra long versions, but they don't register quite as cleanly as other tactile buttons I've used. What cherry keys were you looking at Paul?

One of the reasons I made the keypad i2c in the first place was because at that point I hadn't written the software and didn't know whether I'd want to change the keypad layout. Now might be the ideal time for us to critically review the buttons. Do we need as many as we have? If we assume the use of an encoder should we get rid of a couple? Personally, I find the unit easy to use as it is, but it might look more professional with fewer buttons. Also, my rotary encoder has a button press, which I just map to the centre ok button at the moment.

Also, for the button pad, if we don't have a standardised enclosure, pin headers for external LEDs might be the way to go rather than surface mount. I haven't made use of the LEDs yet, but I imagine they could be useful for something like link status (as with the original ardustation).

Paul Feely October 30, 2013 at 1:04pm

Colin, away from home at the moment but looks like it's really coming together.

Jani, on the hardware, the keyboard buttons are a bit nasty! Addition of an encoder is really useful and might be worth building in. I'm hacking together an separate i2c button board for quick and easy mode changes (5 nice Cherry keys in a row with LEDs to indicate mode)

Admin

Thomas J Coyle III October 30, 2013 at 10:12am

@Colin,

I just loaded version 0.6_ulbox and it is working great. I went back and setup the button pattern and adjusted the GPS time to my time zone.

One question about the heading parameter. It appears to be the heading of the UAV, however it is about 180 deg out unless the (-) sign in front of the heading value is supposed to indicate something?

Regards,

TCIII ArduRover2 Developer

Robert McC October 29, 2013 at 7:34pm

@Colin,

Here's a link to info on the 3dr radios:

http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-using-the-3dr-radio-for-tel...

RSSI on both ends is done in MAVLINK "radio" packets instead of hardware. The above link could give you some insight to RSSI on the 3dr radios.

Here's a link to the MAVLINK Radio packet info:

https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/blob/master/libraries/GCS_MA...

At this point I can offer to help test any code as I have an ASM1.5, 3DR radios and PX4 combo. I also have a APM 2.0 I can use in place of the PX4 for test purpose. I will try to sniff around on the code side myself to what I can find.

Keep up the great work!

Robert...

Developer

Jani Hirvinen October 29, 2013 at 7:11pm

@Colin, great progress on code. Looks like we need to fork 0.6 again to our main antenna tracker box. Colin did you find all pins ok from board?

Would be great to get some feedback for hardware as we are planning to make new revision of it in next 2 months or so. At least new board will have internal regulator and few extra fuses. Also keyboard will get some facelift

Colin October 29, 2013 at 5:36pm

I've just updated the wiki page on creating custom pages for ASM. It's a bit brief, but points out where code needs to be inserted. Might help if you're tinkering....

https://github.com/cgwood/ArdustationMega/wiki/Creating-a-Custom-Page

cgwood/ArdustationMega

Contribute to cgwood/ArdustationMega development by creating an account on GitHub.

Admin

Thomas J Coyle III October 29, 2013 at 4:40pm

@Colin,

Good work! Can't wait to give it a try.

Regards,

TCIII ArduRover2 Developer

Colin October 29, 2013 at 4:35pm

Hi All,

Version 0.6 is now available:

Mediatek

UBlox

Since 0.5 I've improved the parameter download reliability even further. The parameters download automatically, the progress is now smoothly updated on the "ASM Status" screen (page 2) and the ASM will retry if any timeouts occur.

The second page is the ASM status page. I've gathered some of the information that was scattered about into this page. It gives a good overview of the health, such as downloaded parameters, gps and SD status and what the average period of the heartbeat is (for APM, we want this to be around 1000ms, if it's a lot larger then we're dropping heartbeats). The time being displayed is taken from the GPS output; you can update this for your timezone by going to the GPS Timezone option on the settings page.

I've fixed the pin mappings for the jDrones ASM for radio RSSI and ASM voltage detect. These are indicated on the main page by the left two vertical bars. If you want to use radio RSSI you need to plug the analog RSSI out from the xbee into the leftmost analog port (next to the GLCD header) on the ASM board. I'm not sure if the 3DR radios have RSSI out... perhaps they can do it in software?

Whilst on the subject of the main page, the right hand side is the UAV voltage status. The sat count is now the sat count for the UAV, as are the altitude and speed (these were previous ASM values whilst I was debugging). The circle is an indicator for the bearing to the UAV- although I think this is playing up a bit at the moment. Underneath the circle is the distance to the UAV. The number of after Plane/Copter/Rover is the mavlink system id of the vehicle- maybe we can do something useful with this at a later date...

Copters now have a settings page on top of the rate PID page. Although these could probably do with updating based on any feedback users are able to give me on the most useful parameters and ordering / groupings.

I've revamped the button behaviour- previously I had a quick hack in place so we could hold buttons down to get repeat behaviour. Now there are two settings you can change (in the settings page), which are: delay before repeating occurs and delay between button repeats. In other words, when you press and hold a button it will wait 500ms before effectively registering another press of the button and then every 150ms after that it will press the button again. This is the case for up,down,left,right but ok and cancel you can hold down for a long press - not for repeating.

Hopefully that made sense... Either way, you can fiddle with those two keypad delay settings if you don't like how the buttons respond. Also, we now have the option for long pressing / holding the ok button on some pages to enter menus etc.

I fixed a bug we had on elevation in the antenna tracking code (thanks Jack). Also, to make development life easier, I've added a page for the antenna tracking. From here you can see what the calculated bearing and elevations to the UAV are. You can also see the servo output positions in percent. If you have a rotary encoder attached you can use this to overwrite the calculated bearing or elevation angles to test the servo operation. Press up and down on the keypad within this screen to determine what the encoder is altering.

The settings have been updated, so when you upload this version you will lose all of your settings and have to re-pick them again.

Regards,
Colin

Blogs

ArduStation Mega v1.0b arrived

Comments