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
q bit expensive i think, but looks nice. Anyway i must say i always found max7456 to be a very intrusive OSD for FPV.
how good its the accuracy of voltaje and how good does it handle switching noise from camera regulators?
simpleOSD from flytron was a quite simple board, with almost no components on it, like minimOSD and had a very very bad voltaje accuracity, always dancing and so on, and also was like no filtered at all, because was unable to get any satelitte with a kx171 G2, witch is a camera with high levels of noise.
for example RVOSD is much more bulky but is ultra filtered and very well designed.
OK, thanks, I just placed an order :)
@eagle123, happy flights with your brand new OSD!
@Dror, it works pretty fine. Some guys from the Dev Team have tested it on ArduCopters with GoPro cameras. I do prefer to use the Optional Setup (for critical cooling conditions) for ArduCopter. The only difference is that GoPro cameras have it's independent battery.
OK, so the next question: is the h/w stable? I have an ACM1 card waiting to be built into a quadcopter, it will probably take some weeks or even more until I get to do it. So I can wait for the s/w update and order the MinimOSD now - as long as I'm certain the h/w itself is OK.
@Dror, the short answer is: Yes it is. It will work the same way it already works on Mission Planner.
The long answer is Yes, but has some temporary restrictions. Let me try to explain it: You can notice even on MP that --at least until few days ago-- two telemetry resources from ArduPlane still need to be included on ACM. The first is the usage of the voltage divider from IMU board in order to feed MAVLink messages with infos about battery voltage and battery remaining. The other one is to set properly the "type of drone" on the MAVLink header, so we could enable the "Flight Mode" panel which is already coded, but is commented on the firmware waiting for that implementation to auto-switching internally between ArduPlane and ArduCopter (remember that we don't have a drop-down menu to select it like on MissionPlanner). Like I said it's temporary. I believe that Jason can fix that soon. Probably, it's just because he needs to prioritize the navigation control development.
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. =)
@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??
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