Hello guys!
I'm very happy to tell you that the MinimOSD is now in stock in the DIY Drones store!
And more: It goes with a nice customized CharSet and an open source OSD firmware already flashed! ;)
The firmware is Arduino compatible and it uses the original APM MAVLink messages to bring out with some nice features.
Here you can see the Artificial Horizon being tested on HIL side by side with the XPlane AH gauge.
Let me talk a bit more about the firmware that goes flashed on the board:
The current open sourced OSD implementation is part of the ArduCAM OSD project which has support from all the DIYD Dev Team.
The requested APM MAVLink messages are grabbed, translated and it's displayed pretty fast.
But... why it supposed to be fast?
Firstly, the OSD class descends from BetterStream from Mike Smith, which turns it able to format and print better than the Arduino's avr-libc variant does.
Second, the CharSet was rearranged to match the ASCII table. It eliminates the need for a "translation" layer.
There is also a smart way to write individual panels with less SPI transactions (that is conventionally used only to write the full screen at once).
The MAVLink parsing uses a reduced number of buffers, which fits better m328p's resources.
Those things above improves considerably the OSD job.
Our friend Jani already wrote the EEPROM routines to make it configurable. So, it has the base for an external configuration tool.
There is much more work to be done for adding functions and improve it.
We're pretty sure that it will be improved a lot in the hands of the awesome DIYD comunity.
Well, let's talk about features:
MinimOSD is able to work attached to the ArduPilot telemetry port in two modes:
1 - as master i.e. requesting rates of all required messages from APM (both TX and RX from OSD board are connected);
2 - as "sniffer" i.e. just listening to all the messages requested from the GCS (only TX from OSD board is connected).
The firmware auto-detects PAL or NTSC and adjusts the panels.
Until now it has this panels:
- MAVBeats pulse
- Altitude
- Speed
- Battery voltage
- Battery Remaining
- Throttle
- Number of Visible Satellites
- GPS Fix data
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Artificial Horizon
- Heading (0-360)
- Compass (N,E,S,W)
- Pitch
- Roll
- Distance to home*
- Direction to home*
*Based on spherical coords with geographic distortion corrected;
The hard work continues... but, the fun is already granted, of course!
Grab yours right now and happy flights! ;)
Comments
Is the MinimOSD compatible with ACM 2.1 s/w?
@Grips, yes its exactly the case. You can implement RSSI on 2560 too, but you'll need to find out a free analog pin and change APM2560 code to handle this and send to MAVLink. On APM2.0 it is already on the pin-map. We'll need to add a parallel code to handle the new MAVLink 1.0 too.
@Remo, there is a development in course. If you look at this post from Chris "DIY Drones 2011 Product Preview" you'll see something about a "Universal Groud Station". All I can tell you is that we're getting close. =)
Exactly my thoughts. Good give us a antenna tracker interface. But thanx for the great work so far!
This is great news. I'll be ordering one ASAP. I predict that it is compatible with both the APM 2560 and the APM 2.0? The major difference noted so-far is that the new APM 2.0 has a 'RSSI-out' that can be used to display the signal whereas the APM 2560 is not capable of this?
ahh, thank you Sandro :)
@Sebastian: You just missed the second link of the post. :P It points to ArduCAM OSD project. Here is the direct link to the trunk http://code.google.com/p/arducam-osd/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk%2FA...
I just order the Remzibi OSD last night!!! can I change it with this MiniOSD??
I can't find the firmware anywhere, am I missing something?
I'm really interested in the MAVLink implementation as I'm trying to build a GCS out of an Atmega with graphics LCD.
Hi guys, thank you by the kind words. The congratulations are extended to the great guys on our Dev team. They always gave me all the inspiration and support to keep going on. I'm very happy with all the learning day after day. Though I'm growing up it's true that I'm still a willful dwarf working with giants. LOL
Now to the questions:
@Johann, the ArduCam is still in development and the hardware is being reformulated to fits better USB Host and MAVLink parsing at same time. It works on the m328p, but the SRAM is on it's edge. So, we don't have a ETA yet.
@Gaurav, yes we need a FTDI cable in order to program it by using the Arduino IDE, etc;
@Martjin Van Gene and @Gent Armedo: It will work even better with APM2 which has a dedicated RSSI input that will allow us to add it to the panel set.
Congrats. Now if we could only have an antenna tracker work with it ! Ah. the wish list never ends.
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