GroundControl and MAVLink have been improved substantially behind the scenes over the last months. The most obvious new feature on the user level are custom user widgets. You can configure yourself parameter sliders and buttons and even export this widget into a *.qgw file, which other users can import. The video shows how to create a custom attitude control widget for ArduPilotMega. Most of the other improvements are speed and stability improvements which are not directly visible, but improve the user experience a lot. Since we wanted to make sure to get some testing done this is the first preview of the new version. Before end-users can test it, it will also require porting all autopilots, e.g. APM, to MAVLink v1.0.0, which is already scheduled and will happen in a few weeks. Porting is straightforward, as the C-API is mostly unchanged, only a few message signatures were updated.
Thanks to Andrew Tridgell and Paul Grobler for their contributions on the protocol. And Andrew Tridgell completely rebased the protocol generator on Python, allowing to now generate C and Python code from a single generator.
A porting guide for autopilots will be available soon.
Comments
The 3D maps view in the interface, is that using Google Earth?
yeah, i will put it in my future groundstation ! (linux + qgroundcontrol with touchscreen without any X server)
It would be cool to add features like log downloading from usb and firmware loading in qgroundcontrol (i've not experiment more this software, it's possible that there is such features that i didn't see)
Thanks very much to Tridge for creating the python generator. The MAVLink branch of MatrixPilot has already moved over to using that generator, as we use python to develop our other flight analysis and control tools. Thanks too to Paul G, for other improvements which directly help the dspic autopilots. It also great to see QGroundControl improving. I have really enjoyed being able to graph various parameters with absolute ease. MAVLink is super, Thanks Pixhawk team for releasing it into the wild.