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.