Tau Labs Installing GCS

Kilby

Kilby

Active Member
So, has anyone here tried to get GCS set up yet in anticipation of your board arriving? Maybe we should post up some tips or bullet points here for those about to take the plunge? At least a clip from the wiki I would say.

I'm hoping to try it out this weekend if I can find the time. What all do I need to download first to get started? Is there an installer for Mac OSX, or do I have to compile it myself?
 



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dankers

Member
Sorry about the delay guys, so much to do and we are only a hobby project as well. What I do know is James has applied to join the forums as he is the lead developer on the flight side of things. He is also an exclusive Mac developers, right now he is working on packaging the GCS for Mac because of this thread, its 3am in the morning but I think he will not sleep till it is done, hes like that.

No need to install from source. There are some UI issues that we need to address, still but its all looking good for a packaged version for Macs shortly.
 



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peabody124

Member

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Droider

Droider

Drone Enthusiast
peabody124 said:
Yeah sorry. Fell asleep watching GCS build. I have now got the packaging working so that it works without installing any libraries.

http://wiki.openpilot.org/display/B...ilot+Builds#Pre-ReleaseOpenPilotBuilds-MACOSX

Let me know about problems (p.s. I'll see questions more rapidly on our forums but I'll try and check in periodically).

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Wow.. thank you so much for that.. Its great to see someone pushing stuff the way of macs and linux as well as windows.. well impressed. Ill give it ago today and get back to you. Still waiting for the board but hayho..

Dave
 

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peabody124

Member
Yeah I'm a mac guy so that was the first thing I did when I joined - fix the odd mac compile bug. I tested the packages on 10.4 and 10.5 and those didn't work, so right now it's 10.6 only. If there are many people complaining about that I'll try and fix it, but getting the Qt redistributable files packaged was enough tedium for this weekend!
 

Droider

Droider

Drone Enthusiast
I have downloaded it but not run it yet.. I have to go out and catch sunday dinner!

I am on 10.6 anyhow so should be ok. One thing it did take ages to download.. not sure if it was a sunday morning go slow or what.. No mither though I got it

MAny Thanks for your hard work

DAve
 

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dankers

Member
The project has always had a goal to be multi-platform and it is one of the things that has slowed the project down a great deal, it takes a lot of thought and planning to do it right. For people that have hardware you will also notice there are no drivers for the OpenPilot board required on any platform either, again a design choice, plug it in to USB and it just works.

Its very hard, in a few lines, to stress how different OpenPilot is and I am not sure you guys will really care but we are a totally non-profit project community project. A small percentage of the board sales come back to the project to help it go forward and we try to keep the costs as low as we can. While other projects seem to charge what they can get away with, we do not, only enough to keep things going forward and that helps all of us get something magical. Everyone is a volunteer, in fact I'm the only full time guy and I volunteer my time to help organise things and keep OpenPilot moving forward, that is sometimes a thankless task!

Community is the whole reason behind OP, we are not some business of course, OpenPilot is for everyone and that includes all of you of course, its why we do what we do!
 
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Crash

Defies Psychics
dankers said:
..snip...Everyone is a volunteer, in fact I'm the only full time guy and I volunteer my time to help organise things and keep OpenPilot moving forward, that is sometimes a thankless task!
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No it's not. Thank you Dave. I've been lurking on the project long enough and spying on the chat every once in a while. I see what you guys do and how you interact and plan. It is indeed a special project with many great minds. I hope to make some contribution at the point where I can actually provide something useful.
 

Droider

Droider

Drone Enthusiast
Dankers..

Thank you for posting your comments. I for one and I am sure many others on this great OPEN Forum will also thank you and your team. It does seem to good to be true and I only thought last night the commercial boys must be kinda a tad peeved that you and your merry band of men are doing something for the challenge and love of it and not just monetary gain.

You can just tell from your WiKi the dedication that has gone in to it must mean the same for the products. Unlike some others!

Again many thanks and I look forward to playing with your teams creation... as soon as the postie drops it through my letter box

Dave
 



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Gary Mortimer

Member
Are you still waffling on...

The GCS ground control station, will allow you to track your board if you hook a up a GPS and XBee or change PIDs whilst airborne.

Perhaps in the future a bit of control over the platform as well.

Although thats really the preserve of CC's big brother the OpenPilot mainboard.

That will have click and go along with some other things we have put a bit of thought into....

For now though the GCS will be needed to set your board up, Daves got a video coming for that. (Its crunching on Vimeo)
 

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dankers

Member
If we said too much about what we have planned it would not be fair in case some of it does not come off, there is some cool stuff though.

There is actually a feature in the GCS now that enables you to tune the pids in flight, but of course you need two people, one to fly and say what to change and one to change them on the GCS.

OK, will start a new thread with my lame video.
 

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peabody124

Member
dankers said:
There is actually a feature in the GCS now that enables you to tune the pids in flight, but of course you need two people, one to fly and say what to change and one to change them on the GCS.
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And you really need to not make a typo! Not so bad with planes...
 

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Crash

Defies Psychics
peabody124 said:
And you really need to not make a typo! Not so bad with planes...
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Will it work with my tuning box? It uses regular pots on a joystick interface but encoder wheels would be optimal. No typos when you spin a dial.
 

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peabody124

Member
Hard for me to say since I don't see the output type. Probably not trivial though. One of the guys posted a python script that runs on the ground station (if you have telemetry) and monitors you extra TX knobs and updates PID settings that way though. We could also do it on flight side in the firmware (and did at one point) but I am trying to keep the tx interface uncluttered when we can push things to the ground station. Especially one-offs like tuning. We have a tuning guide http://wiki.openpilot.org/display/Doc/Stabilization+Tuning++Multirotor .
 

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