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.
- 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.
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.
(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!
Comments
Here is an analog logbook (printed on plastic): the batteries never run on this one.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/323197692194
@Weiliang Thanks for all your feedback and assistance here and via e-mail!
@Tiaan, I got the logs thanks. Both logs has CURR information so the error must be on our side. We are fixing it now.
@Graham, Sorry about that, please send the logs to hello@exmaps.com and we will check it out for you.
Hi Weiliang
Ok, so after some further testing:
I have always been downloading log via CLI in Mission Planner over USB cable from Pixhawk and thus only ever ended up with .log files and no .bin files. Since updating the Pixhawk firmware to 3.2 I have had to use the download logs via Mavlink function and this also generated the binary .bin files alongside the .log files. When the .bin files are uploaded to Exmaps, it works perfectly and the mAh info is displayed the same way as it would from the .tlog files.
I have also converted the .bin files from my AC3.2 flights to .log (in Mission Planner) to see if taking the USB cable out of the mix changes anything in the converting process but the .log generated, once uploaded to Exmaps, also shows no mAh info.
For all my flights from now on I will use the .bin files downloaded via Mavlink in Mission Planner to upload to Exmaps in order to get the mAh info also generated. So its not an issue really, just would have been nice to see the mAh data on Exmaps for the first 30 or so flights with the Pixhawk before I started downloading the dataflash logs via Mavlink instead of CLI. I have sent the files I used to test this via e-mail as requested just for your own testing but don't worry too much about it, I will calculate the mAh values for the older flights from the raw data in an excel spreadsheet and just use the .bin files for Exmaps from now on.
Thanks for the assistance in any case. Keep up the good work, easy and streamlined (and cloud) data/flight logging is a must for small UAS and you already have a great platform! Looking forward to seeing your system evolve with new features etc.
I can't upload anything to the site, I keep getting the following errors:
Tiaan Roux then its probably our bad. Can you send the log to hello@exmaps.com please for us to take a look?
Hi Weilang
Thanks for the quick feedback. As you can see from the attached screenshot CURR is enabled for all my .logs. Most of my logs were flown with AC3.1.5 and this particular one with AC3.2 (no CLI in 3.2) but both had CURR enabled.
I am getting the standard power usage screen on Exmaps (second attachment) but no mAh information like a tlog provides through Exmaps. Am I missing something?
Thanks!
@Oscar, OK if I hear you correctly you want the ability to select a date range and the system summarises flight time, distance etc and then compare with another date range?
@Weiliang, yes true the flights are already organized by date. I was proposing a filtering solution to
accommodate for long time users or people with many flights. If you have a chance take a look at
how Google Analytics handles this:
The reason why it is not displayed is because it is not recorded. To enable recording follow the guide here:
http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/downloading-and-analyzing-data-log...
Use the terminal method and enable CURRENT. That should do it.
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