Hello all, I have an inquiry regarding my new 3DR Aero. After a mission, I usually pull the dataflash logs for review or to perform geo referencing of photos. After a 75 minute mission, it takes Mission Planner close to an hour to pull a ~50 mb file off the Pixhawk which is completely unacceptable. I am using the provided USB port on the side of the Aero fuselage. On multirotors I always pull the micro SD card but that is impossible the way the Pixhawk is installed into the Skywalker airframe.
I am about to make a hole for extracting the card, but what is everyone else doing? I find it astounding that in 2014 with a USB connection that it takes more than a few seconds to download a complete log file regardless of the size. Last night I let Mission Planner download all logs from the Pixhawk. It took over 6 hours to download a few hundred MB of log files, is this normal?
I don’t have an Aero, but I have a Pixhawk installed in a 2014 Skywalker which is the same plane. The front of my PH is mounted with enough room in front of it to allow the card to be extracted. How is the Aero configured that it won’t allow access to the card without making a hole in the plane?
Ok, I just looked at a photo and see the GPS blocks you finger. Can’t you move that GPS?
Yes, it takes a really long time to download via USB, I don’t know why.
Nice job getting 75 minutes out of your Aero, did you modify it, or just a bunch of batteries.
I didn’t want to move the GPS since 3Dr uses a nice little bracket to support it in the electronics bay. I may have to put the GPS on velcro although I doubt that would be good for the compass readings.
I was surprised at the flight time as well. 3Dr claims 45 minutes. The first flight I ever took with the Aero was ~63 minutes and had 3.65v/ cell left. I was flying relatively gently in FBW A and flying auto missions at 12-13 M/sec but this is all on a 4S6000mah battery although my Thunder Power battery flies for almost 10 minutes longer than the battery that 3DR shipped. At 12 m/sec the motor draws 4-6 amps. That was with a nadir Cannon S110 on board and wind blowing @ 12 gusting to 20 at times.
The logs should download far quicker then that over USB. I connected my pixhawk via the USB cable to my linux laptop running mavproxy and download a 51Meg bin file. Mavproxy’s output was
Finished downloading log10.bin (51580928 bytes 298 seconds, 172.5 kbyte/sec 2 retries)
So a 50Meg file about 5 minutes. This proved that download logs from the pixhawk is reasonably fast.
I then connected the pixhawk to my windows 7 laptop and followed these instructions copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/downlo … n-planner/
Again it was in the 5-7 minute range to download the log files. @Matt, you must have something causing the log downloads to run slowly. Have you got a USB hub in the middle? Is your USB cable dodgy? Can you download from another computer to see if its any better? Is the SD Card in the plane faulty? Gotta be something like that.
Thanks, Grant.