Developer

MinimOSD in DIYDrones Store!

Hello guys!
I'm very happy to tell you that the MinimOSD is now in stock in the DIY Drones store!
3689439887?profile=originalAnd 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! ;)

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Comments

  • How can i connect the miniosd to the fatshark?
    In the diagram only are with 12 volts, but the fatshark camera works with 5 volts!,,
    What can i do?
  • Hi guys,

    Has anybody experience of connecting MinimOSD wit keychain HD cameras like 808 #16.

  • mine FTDI cable is 5v ....how can i do it ??

    i bought it from sparkfun  this is https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9716?
    can i programm it ???

    SparkFun FTDI Basic Breakout - 5V
    This is a basic breakout board for the FTDI FT232RL USB to serial IC. The pinout of this board matches the FTDI cable to work with 5V Arduino boards.
  • Just wanting to let peeps know if it's not already in the thread - you can easily upgrade the firmware on the minim without an FTDI cable - if you already have an Arduino Uno or similar unit.

    Just wire up a +5, GND, TX and RX (tx1 and RX1 - or digi pin 0 and 1.) - to the corresponding pins on the minim detached from the APM that is.3692470440?profile=original

    Connect the RESET on the UNO to GND - this will prevent the onboard ATMega328 from booting it's bootloader and interfering with the TX/RX.

    For my cable I've just used a 10cm servo cable and an extra lead that is then just hot glued and heatshrinked together.

    Next open up your OSD_COnfig and right as you press the OPEN button from having selected your appropriate Firmware, press on the reset button on the minim and it will start the upload.

    The reason you need to use the Reset button is the normal FTDI cable is five lines where one connects to the Reset and the software does that process for you right before it sends the hex file to the unit for programming.  So what you are doing is pressing reset, loading the bootloader which readies the unit for flashing.

    You don't have to do the same for the charset, just upload it with cable connected, no reset required.

    OK so why would you do this rather than the FTDI...? well I ordered mine and it is stuck in transit but I wanted to see minim interacting with APM over the weekend and I've got 3 different Arduino boards here that I fiddle with - so I find this more satisfying, and the reality is there is more diversity in this sort of setup. But each to his own.

  • yes, it set to RTS on close. kind of stuck atm. The OSD gui I found among the binaries, ready compiled packages.

  • Developer

    @Björn, everything OK here. Tested from the new Firmware to the CharSet updating by using the DIYDrones FTDI cable. The current config used was the 0.5.4425.14358

    Did you set the "RTS on close" for the adapter's serial port?

    Anyway, the internal "auto reset" code of ArduCAM Config is the same as the Arduino IDE.

  • Developer

    @Björn, I'll check it all in few minutes.

  • I cant use that images, use those upgrades as OSD gui cant communicate with board, to do the upgrade. I might have screwed it up then by using Arduino IDE and upgrade from there then. 

  • OSD gui doesn't accept any communication with OSD oard, regardless if it's read, write to eeprom or ifs its software update that is sent to board.

    Upgrading code goes well from Arduino IDE as descibed above. I use the code that is mentioned above.

    As code actually gets to the board via the IDE compilation and uploading, there must be a miss match codewise between actually compilation in board and the OSD gui sw, the only thing that makes sense to me, maybe there is something I don't see as well and didn't think of.

  • Is it working with the official compiled firmware ?

    https://arducam-osd.googlecode.com/files/MinimOSD_19_MAV10.hex

    Firmware should be uploaded with OSD GUI

    https://code.google.com/p/arducam-osd/wiki/Update_Firmware

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