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  • John Milburn March 14, 2015 at 9:14am

    @Franc, would you mind to share assets of the design? I'm working on ground station for Win8/10 tablets at the moment. It would be great if you allow me to use the presented design for it.

  • Charlie Parr February 5, 2015 at 9:11am

    @ Jethro, thanks! Function over fashion, agreed. The emphasis must be on the data. I look forward to having more material for folks on here to critique soon.

  • Jethro Hazelhurst February 5, 2015 at 12:37am

    @ Charlie, welcome aboard! It is really encouraging to see our ground-station software getting a design overhaul.

    But above aesthetics and the 'user experience' we need functionality.

    Best regards!

  • Charlie Parr February 4, 2015 at 3:44pm

    Hi Everyone,

    I'm Charlie Parr and I work with the group in Alaska that Oscar mentioned. We are called ArcticFire and we are developing our own GCS. Bruce Crevensten founded the group and is leading the development of a friendly, outcome-oriented GCS. I appreciate the discussion here - I truly believe the GCS is presently the missing link in UAV technology. We need something that turns user intent into a data outcome. I like John Birkeland's line about "efficient and intuitive information transfer to the pilot."

    Anyway if you are interested in following our progress visit our site and sign up for updates. Here is a demo of one of the apps for our GCS, 'Free Flight' :

    P.S. This is my first post on DIY Drones...I am stoked to be part of the community!

  • Nicholas Witham February 4, 2015 at 3:11pm

    Please make it easier to use with a touch screen.

    I use a windows tablet and MP is not the easiest with touch.

  • Franc February 4, 2015 at 7:46am

    The black interface it's a false problem per se... I think you mean "contrast" which I agree I can push more the contrast:

    1. also seems AMOLED display can save up to 41% batteries with dark interfaces

    2. either dark or bright... when I used a GCS on the field, I had to use a hood (literally i built it with black foam board)

  • Developer
    John Arne Birkeland February 4, 2015 at 2:55am

    I applaud the effort since there is much room for improvement in the current generation of GCS software.

    But at the same time be careful that you don't fall into the typical designer trap where aesthetics become more important then functionality. For example, a inverted dark palette looks great for web snapshots, but is mostly useless for using in bright sunlight scenarios. So in short a good GCS design is all about efficient and intuitive transfer of information to the pilot.

  • Fredia Huya-Kouadio February 4, 2015 at 12:05am

    @Franc, one of the area DroidPlanner 3 (renamed Tower) is working on is to improve the UX. I'd be interested in hearing about your full impressions of the current UX, and how you think it could be improved. 

  • Ronen Aknin February 3, 2015 at 10:59pm

    What i will be glad to see as  user is as following:

    1. Row on top of the screen with most importent data like

         Gps: Lock/unlock status mark by color and the number of sattelites locked.

         Battery: status and usage

         Time: Time since take off, remaining time left

          Distance/latitude/speed: Distance from takeoff position/current lattitude/drone speed

          Drone orientaion/direction: orientation/direction like south/east, north/west etc ...

           Flight mode: loiter,rtl etc. .....

    2. All the above parameters order can be change by user i.e drag and drop.

    3. Alarms/Alerts must be popup in the middle of the screen maps.

  • Franc February 3, 2015 at 9:09pm

    @Craig of course I do

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