Posted by Kyle Corbitt on April 10, 2009 at 7:30pm
Hey everyone, I would like to take this opportunity to post a screenshot of the groundstation I've just begun work on. I haven't gotten very far in the short time I've been working on it, but my goal is to release it around the same time as the upcoming ArduPilot Pro, which should have the ability to use a two-way digital radio for control. That gives me a good chunk of time for development and tuning.
I've put more time into playing around with different layouts than anything else so far, and I think I've settled on one that seems servicable. I would greatly appreciate it though if other community members (particularly those involved with ArduPilot Pro development) could let me know what you think of the direction I'm going... it would be much better to know sooner than later if I'm barking up the wrong tree!I should also mention that currently the "File" menu is set up as follows:"Load MissionSave Mission-------------Import KMLExport KML-------------Load PlaybackSave Playback-------------Exit"(there is nothing under "Settings" yet)Finally, for anyone interested in the code itself, I've been developing in Python using wxPython for the GUI elements.
Great! Adding graphical instrument displays was one of my priorities as well, after getting a working backend. I was going to ask a friend much more talented than myself to generate the actual images (vector or bitmap) but if you're creating some anyway recycling those is probably the best way to go.
Currently I'm messing with SVGs in Inkscape, I'm making some custom widgets for the main flight instruments a bit like the attopilot GCS. Not being an artist, this is taking me a while! Once I get these done I'll do a screen shot so you can tell the direction I'm thinking. It won't be like the current Atto GCS as the instruments are just one way of viewing the aircraft's status, they will just be one of the dock widgets hence why I'm using SVG, so they can scale cleanly. Apart from that, I have Google maps working, as it loads the tiles, but it is basic and I need a way to pre-download and cache them etc etc. Nothing backend has been done, the fact I don't have an Ardupilot yet plus I need to know how Jordi is compressing the telemetry and it's format. Should be easy enough to get the string with pyserial and readline.
Cool. I don't have any back end to speak of just yet, but as soon as I do I'll upload it and you can take what works. Do you have anything shareable completed?
Nice work. I guess there is going to be two of these as I have done a fair bit of code on mine but using QT, it is currently in C++ but I'll move to Python and QT bindings as it is something I want to play with plus we can share back end code.
To add some sort of brainstorming.....from the other side of the atlantik...
- internationalization (I wouldn't mind doing the German bit)
- Realizing the aim for a full blown ground station, it would be versatile to
use it as a sort of reduced interface for telemetrie data, with ut the uplink.
Comments
Kyle
- internationalization (I wouldn't mind doing the German bit)
- Realizing the aim for a full blown ground station, it would be versatile to
use it as a sort of reduced interface for telemetrie data, with ut the uplink.
just my two cent.