Exciting flight: Kudos!

[Jippieee]

After a more then a year lying aroung I decided to give the Gluonpilot another go. Installed the latest .8 beta and GCS. It was good to see the big improvements both functional and in the configuration GUI. I put the gluonpilot away in the past because I had trouble with it's behaviour. Not sure it was an airfame, configuration or hardware problem but today I only expericenced smooth flights, just as you would expect from a nice system like this!

I left home with a simple program for: auto take off - stand by - auto land - flare. With minimal PID tuning I got it stable in semi-auto mode and quickly did some tests with the auto-landing. By the way the auto landing was triggered by moving the "manual-semi automatic-automatic" control slider a bit further to the "land" position.

Now the fun part: It was getting really dark at 9:30 pm and decided to let the Funjet to climb to 100 meters and fly circles at 200m distance with 100m radius so I quickly got to the point where the plane got out of visual sight. I could not even hear it at some point as there was some ambient noise. The test flights went well, the battery was charged so what could go wrong... a lot I suppose, but that is the fun factor right? Anyway after flipping to autolanding I heard the plane entering the landing loop and a few moments the after the motor turned off the plane landed a few meters away from me. A complete UAV experince! Not sure yet if I extend my setup with cam and xbee link but this already gives a good taste.

[icebear]

Good to hear about the succesful flight! I hope to report more about my new airframe soon...
/Bjorn

[Tom]

Clever idea about the auto-landing trick without XBee!

I would certainly recommend to add an XBee link. It's exciting to see your plane on a map, and make even more complex commands!

[Jippieee]

Hi Tom,

XBee module seems to be out of stock. Not sure if it is overkill for my simple intention: just have some fun and put it in my glider for safe homing if I loose visual contact.

Tom, please have a look at this:
1) Could you add some default flight plan behaviour when entering automatic mode. The options could be:
- Resume with last block. (This is the current behaviour).
- Return to start block or pre-set block. This would allow me to re-enter the auto-takeoff block after a landing without rebooting the module.

2) Add functionality to implement flight plan selection via transmitter, just as you would select the buttons via xbee. I know the options would be limited but it could be just enough to:
- select one or two flight patterns
- home
- land

Thanks,
Marc

[lukasz]

Hi Tom,
2) Add functionality to implement flight plan selection via transmitter, just as you would select the buttons via xbee. I know the options would be limited but it could be just enough to:
- one or two patterns
- home
- land

Thanks,
Marc

Tom, I guess this could be done by RX stick combination.
When the plane is in AP mode than using stick combination we could change blocks.
Of course stick combination would be predefined upon flight creation.

[Tom]

I am thinking of a command similar to SET_BATTERY_ALARM:
Something like SET_FLIGHTPLAN_SWITCH with the inputs:
Input channel: 5 or 6
* When switched to position 1, go to navigation line X
* When switched to position 2, go to navigation line Y
* When switched to position 3, go to navigation line Z

With:
* position 1: > 1.6ms
* position 2: > 1.4ms and < 1.6ms
* position 3: < 1.4ms

If you only have a 2-state switch instead of a 3-state switch, don't use "position 2".

Would that fulfill your needs?

[Jippieee]

I am thinking of a command similar to SET_BATTERY_ALARM:
Something like SET_FLIGHTPLAN_SWITCH with the inputs:
Input channel: 5 or 6
* When switched to position 1, go to navigation line X
* When switched to position 2, go to navigation line Y
* When switched to position 3, go to navigation line Z

With:
* position 1: > 1.6ms
* position 2: > 1.4ms and < 1.6ms
* position 3: < 1.4ms

If you only have a 2-state switch instead of a 3-state switch, don't use "position 2".

Would that fulfill your needs?

That would be excellent! Be careful to use filtered rc switch inputs as you do not want a glitch to change the flight plan....

Just a thought: a new block type that acts as master controller block, which runs in parallel with the flight plan, could also be considered. Although this is more complicated it provides more freedom to make logic choices in flight. Things that come in mind are: fail safe handling, low battery handling, and of course rx input handling such as switch position changes. Also one of the things I like to implement this way is an abort landing command (and go back to climb-standby).

[Tom]

Yes I have been thinking for a long time about a "master block". Micropilot can have several separate scripts which can run in parallel. I guess I should make some benchmark tests to see how many script lines I can execute before affecting performance. Right now about 4 lines per second are executed. Having a masterblock of for example 8 lines which have to be executed every second could have an impact.

Wouldn't the "SET_FLIGHTPLAN_SWITCH" command allow you to abort a landing?

[Jippieee]

Yes I have been thinking for a long time about a "master block". Micropilot can have several separate scripts which can run in parallel. I guess I should make some benchmark tests to see how many script lines I can execute before affecting performance. Right now about 4 lines per second are executed. Having a masterblock of for example 8 lines which have to be executed every second could have an impact.

Wouldn't the "SET_FLIGHTPLAN_SWITCH" command allow you to abort a landing?

One thing at a time SET_FLIGHTPLAN_SWITCH is a great idea!

As an example you can set it to:
SW1_POS1: Start/Standby pattern (also used to abort landing)
SW1_POS2: Fly pattern 1
SW1_POS3: Landing

This would make me happy and I just cannot wait to see it happen.

No complains but why not use 5 positions? I am not sure if this is really harder to detect but it gives a lot more options! In this case I would use a 3 position switch for position 1,3 and 5 and use another offset switch on my tx to mix in position 2 and 4.

[lukasz]

Guys, why not use stick combination?
It gives much more possibilities.
For example:
altitude stick:
min - go to block 1
max - go to block 2

roll:
min - go to block3
max - go to block4

altitude max, roll left:
go to block 5

altitude max, roll right:
go to block 6

and so on