Noticed a number of changes in Mission Planner lately. The online documentation is dated.
When you plug in a board to your laptop, the MP tries to identify the board and gives you e.g. the following.
a) How this message correlates with the drop down options listed below?
b) How to translate these messages into something more meaningful?
When installing the firmware, under the drop down option now you have all these options. Can someone kindly explain me what does each of these options means. Some names make sense, some are kind of confusing.
a) Cube Black and Purple are self explanatory but what if you have Cube Orange?
b) fmuv2 - What FC?
c) fmuv3 - What FC?
d) mRox21 - ok MRobotics FC.
e) PixHawk1 - **So this is the 2MB version of the Pixhawk. Correct?**
f) Pixhawk1-1M - **What FC?** assume 1M older version?
g) Pixhawk1-1M-bdshot - **What FC?** - are we just enabling D-Shot or ???
e) ignore - **What are we ignoring?**
If there is some detailed documentation out there , I would love to read it. I am not finding one.
MP’s drop-down is showing all the possible AP firmwares that can be loaded onto the board. So each of those is a different autopilot and you’ll need to choose the one that best matches the autopilot you’ve got.
These days you should never pick “fmuv2” or “fmuv3” but instead pick the more specific, “Pixhawk1” or “Pixhawk1-1M”. My guess is that you should pick “Pixhawk1” because if you have a CubePilot CubeBlack or CubePurple you’d probably know very clearly that that’s what you had. Also if you’d purchased the autopilot from mRobotics then I think you’d also know that you have an “mRoX21”.
After you load the firmware and confirmed it’s working, you might want to upload the bootloader and then I think MP will present a shorter list of possible firmwares to load from then on.
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Hi @rmackay9 Thanks for taking the time to explain things, much appreciated.
It still leaves a whole bunch of confusion around other questions raised above.
Who is the key developer for Mission planner firmware load feature? Perhaps that individual can answer in more detail? I looked at the developer list, can’t seem to find who is the stake holder other than Mr. Oborne himself.
We are willing to update the online documentation (wiki) for others once we are clear on how all these options work and what do they mean.
a) If you have a CubeOrange you would not see this drop-down list because it has a bootloader that specifically identifies that it is a CubeOrange. The bootloader on the board you’ve got is very generic and doesn’t tell the GCS enough to know exactly which board it is.
b,c) fmuv2 and fmuv3 are a generic open source board design which many Pixhawk boards used. “fmuv2” was the first version with only 1MB of flash (flash holds the software, e.g. ArduPilot). “fmuv3” was a follow-up design that has 2MB of flash
e) Pixhawk1 is the same as “fmuv3”. Yes this is the 2MB flash version of the Pixhawk
f) Pixhawk-1M is the same as “fmuv2” so yes, it only has 1MB of flash.
g) Pixhawk-1M-bdshot is the same as “Pixhawk-1M” but supports bdshot.
I’ve created a wiki issue to add some explanation about the pop-up list. Feel free to create a PR against the wiki if you’d like. It can sometimes be difficult to get the balance right between providing enough but not too much detail.
Thanks Randy for you comments and action.
As I explained before to @UAVSkies , we are a community based project, and everyone can and should contribute.
ill add to this part
the list is created as part of ardupilot, Mission planner is just the display of this list. So there is no way i would comment on most of whats in that list, other than what i have direct knowledge over.
