Another day, another cool feature to call out in the Mission Planner! (These posts are almost turning into a rolling tutorial series). In today's version (1.0.61), when you right click in the Flight Planner, you can directly enter commands such as Loiter and Jump along with the other commands shown above.
Jump is a handy command, which allows for proper mission scripting. It's like GoTo in Basic: it just jumps the mission to the start, so it can loop forever, or to any other waypoint.
A few small bugs also have been fixed, such as startup issues with older graphics cards.
Comments
I have, what I think is a Mission Planner/3.2/Pixhawk bug which may cause flyaways due to poor compass calibration. On the APM 2.6 it is okay but with Pixhawk the Mission planner calibration routine says calibration is complete after 15 or so seconds although I have only rotated through a little more than one axis. With the APM it waits until I tell it I am done. Calibration is inconsistent and with my CSG neo 8 the offsets are always too large and the internal compass is very different each time. This has been reported by at least one other user.
Very nice features.
It's Michael going to add octocopter to the mission planner? Right now you can not load firmware for octocopter with the mission planer. Althought octos are supported by Ardupilot Mega.
Cool feature!
Just as a suggestion. It would be also good to draw not only circles over the WPs, but also estimated trajectory line of the plane/copter while moving from the current to the next waypoint.
Hello Arno,
There are several failsafe's available. First, you can set up a failsafe so that if your RC connection is lost, APM will RTL. This is described in the wiki. Additionally, if you are so equipped and configured, you can take control from a joystick attached to the GCS. Also, you can define a low battery event, which can also trigger RTL. This feature is probably not as well documented.
what are the chances of having the loiter commands added to the flight data screen so you can right click in there. (I suspect "Fly to here" is the same as "Loiter forever").
As a software engineer, this scares me a little. Are there going to be emergency escape plans? So that, when you run out of battery power, the plane automatically flies back to its start and land there?
Otherwise, if your RC fails, you're basically screwed ..
Nice catch ;-) Fixed!
Michael is a crazy man! He has probably done enough to deserve getting his name spelled correctly in the "ArduCopterMega.pde" credits. Or is this the carrot that drives the rabbit? Thanks for the hard work Michael.
Amazing, I have only been on here for a short while, but Michael Oborne seems to update this thing more or less on a daily basis. Hard to keep up with the news :)