Feature Request: Message colors and notification

Hi all,

I work at a company called Iris Automation which makes a detect-and-avoid solution for drones flying beyond visual line of sight. Naturally, this comes with its share of regulations for the vehicle, the DAA solution, and the ground station.

I’m writing to ask if Mission Planner can be enhanced to meet some of these regulations. Specifically:

  1. When displaying Mavlink STATUSTEXT messages in the “Messages” tab, the messages should be highlighted with colors indicating their severity. AC 25.1322-1 defines the following guidelines:
  1. Color Standardization. The objective of color standardization is to maintain the effectiveness of visual alerts by enabling the flightcrew to readily distinguish between alert categories.
    a. Visual alert indications must conform to the following color convention (§ 25.1322(e))
    (1) Red for warning-alert indications
    (2) Amber or yellow for caution-alert indications
    (3) Any color except red or green for advisory alert indications.
  1. If the “Messages” tab is not visible and a message comes in with severity WARNING or greater, then show a visual indicator that an urgent message requires attention. This could be displayed on the HUD or elsewhere.

I’m willing to help out and contribute code to achieve this. I’ll be forking the Mission Planner project to see what I can do. Does anyone have tips on where to start? Is this something that the Mission Planner developers are willing to include in the official version?

Thanks in advance for your help! Have a great day!

1 Like

makes sence to me, the message tab currently does not support separate color per line, however the high prio and warning messages do already display on the HUD
so
Emergency
Alert
Critial
Error
and warning show on the hud
while
Notice and info only show in the message tab

Thanks for the reply!

I’m not able to see the messages on the HUD like you mentioned. I’m testing by sending a statustext with severity ALERT from our companion computer (system id same as autopilot, component id different from autopilot). I see the test message appear in the “Messages” tab, and I hear the generated speech for the message, but nothing appears on the HUD. Do I need to enable an additional “User Item” to see these?

Thanks again for your help!

so the issue you mention is because of the different component id, it should be appearing in the message tab. normally the hud only shows the messages for the current active selected device. ie the autopilot most likerly in your case.

so sounds like this might need to be optioned

Thanks for clarifying! I forked the MissionPlanner repo to attempt some of these changes. It looks like you already made a change for sub-component messages appear on the HUD as well. This is great!

In my testing, I was still not getting the message on the HUD because the severity was not interpreted as a MAV_SEVERITY. I opened a PR to fix this.

For the message colors, can you provide some direction how to achieve this? I see that the MissionPlanner.Controls.HUD class renders it’s message with a hard-coded color (Red). I attempted to add a severity property to the HUD, but I’m not sure which file sets that value.

I think I figured it out. I opened another PR to set the HUD message color from the severity.