Hello and happy new year for all of you.
I would like to present new functionality of assisting pilot for landing in hard conditions like fog or night recorded last night by Jwalentek, our test pilot using OSD+AP kit,
On screen are 2 new components. One in the centre of view is envelope of runway with approaches lines, second below is ILS with 2 crossed lines showing relation plane to ideal landing path.
At this moment it is experimental firmware. Final functionality should be available soon.
Comments
Hi Pit,
I was the one requested the MAVLink for OSD :). You should remember our talk in the past.
Cheers,
Mariusz
Hello Marek
We understand it and have in plans adding MAVLink protocol. But still we have lot of requests from local market where MAVLink is almost unknown and not used.
Hello Pit,
IMHO problem has "opposite" direction :)
If your OSD will accept MAVLink (via serial and/or CAN) - you increase sale of OSD by thousands %.
Coordinates (GPS longitude and latitude) can be displayed with command "G". Flight mode has own control, but at this time not accessible from API. The "Auxiliary text" can be used to display mode. Screen channel in my opinion is not necessary. OSD has 4 user definable screens and pilot rememeber his screens. In worst case is only 4 to check.
Peripherals: Yes, the OSD can work standalone. In this mode it read information from sensors (GNSS, current sensor, airspeed, temerature). When is tied with other system, OSD can read that parameters from it.
The OSD has own autopilot (AP). It is doughtier board. The autopilot provide stabilisation in the flight and automatic return to home or to next defined waypoint.
The OSD has also telemetry send to the ground over video channel :-) Receiver of that telemetry is Ground Station. It drives tracking antenna, has 2-channel diversity and 3-channel video splitter. Also can store telemetry on micro SD card for off-line analysis. As you can see it is complete system. :-)
Ah you thought of that :) What's probably needed is a small Arduino board to translate Mavlink into what the Pitlab OSD needs. I took a quick look at the API file and I didn't see any functions to set coordinates, flight mode, or screen switch channel. I also see that the Pitlab OSD board itself has plugs for various peripherals such as the RC receiver, GPS, current sensor, etc, but with APM/Pixhawk those devices are already peripherals of the autopilot board itself.
I assume that the reason the Pitlab OSD connects directly to those peripherals is because it is also meant to be used stand-alone (without autopilot) as well. I understand that it's difficult to satisfy all wishes for all situations, but if I were to (and could) design such an OSD, then I'd make it require a telemetry connection to either a full autopilot board with peripherals (such as APM/Pixhawk), or else a connection to a telemetry hub with the same peripheral connections.
turdsurfer: Our OSD can work with other systems, only requirement is access to the code and possibility to implement few commands to send data to OSD. It has published API so if you have free UART port and can implement above protocol, the OSD will display data from your Arducopter etc.
Very nice! I'd like to see more OSDs like this evolve in the future for Arducopter / Mavlink too. Currently the only OSD for Arducopter that's been around is MinimOSD, and it's a poor hardware design imho that hasn't been updated. Hopefully some telemetry communication protocols (such as Mavlink) will become standard so that APs and OSDs of various brands can work modularly and be mixed.
One more flight by laciaty:
http://youtu.be/XQMxrSfVYDM
Doug: Coordination of up to 8 runeways are stored in OSD, so it doesn't need to receive external data. Ground station is not necessary. It receive and store information about plane positon from OSD important for documentation purposes and in case of plane lost etc
Very nice demo! I really like the idea of ILS approach and runway visualization and orientation markings. How are you transmitting ILS data to the aircraft? Is everything contained within the flight controller and OSD or are you using a ground station to send information up to the flight controller?
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