FlightDeck alternative for passtrough telemetry

How do you debug? I understand the Lua sim in Companion won’t allow me to
send these sort of data packets. Is that correct?

You’re right. The simulator is not setup for this. I debug on the RC transmitter using drawtext/drawnumber.

@james_pattison Did you actually do a rewrite and still have it anywhere? This has been brought up again recently elsewhere, and I was going to look at submitting a PR to rebalance the wiki page a bit.

The Craft and Theory stuff is absolutely fantastic. It’s very professional, very well supported, updated and maintained, does a better job than anything else available, very reasonable price, and most importantly provides a turnkey, out of the box solution for those ardupilot users who just want to get on and do stuff rather than get frustrated soldering, hacking code etc. It’s a perfect model for an ardupilot partner that I wished many others would follow (real lack of similar hardware/frame solutions).

However, it is a commercial solution and their wiki updates basically present it as the one and only option and has somewhat wiped out any mention of opensource alternatives which are real and work very well, and for such an opensource project that’s something that could easily be improved with a wiki update.

To reiterate, this is nothing against Craft and Theory who present a great product, and the documentation they’ve provided in the wiki is superb, it’s just a little biased at the expense of opensource alternatives.

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I’m traveling without my laptop, so it’ll be at least two weeks until I can look for whatever isn’t in GitHub (not sure how much I pushed to the remote) but yes. Minor pr is here: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot_wiki/pull/892
Larger one has a max232 how-to, and receiver hack to not need an inverter, but I don’t think I’ve pushed it.
There’s also one or two rejected PR’s from memory.

Regards,

James

In fact there is someone working on a open source alternative with some remarkable results:


It would be nice if someone could help him.

Here is the script:

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I gave it a try, very interesting. What would be useful is if the data was available to be used on a simple OpenTx telemetry screen as text. The graphic screen is OK but just values suit me most of the time.

I haven’t tested this but it looks like it might expose the passthrough values as regular OpenTx telemetry values.

httpwww.craftandtheoryllc.com/forums/topic/a-diy-script-to-rediscover-more-telem-sensors-with-or-without-flightdeck/

I don’t think so. Passthrough telemetry is not “discovered” so the variables available for the Display screens are not populated. Tried it anyway.

I’m also working on an alternative open source telemetry script for both X9D+ and X7

you can find them here

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looks great, will give a try, thanks for the job!

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Fantastic! Just one comment, I don’t think it’s ‘cricket’ to copy c&t flightdeck so closely. They put a lot of time, money and effort into their product, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to copy their design and look.
But really great that there’s an opensource passthrough option.

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It took me a while to decide to release my code because I was aware of the potential objections about the layout. I do believe though that the real value for the community is above all the open protocol that c&t developed.

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Na… @fnoop

That look was common…

Nice work @yaapu

would be nice that you and jplopez could join efforts :wink:

Indeed, one could say it looks like Blomgren’s from 3 yrs ago. Nice job Alex, very functional.

Please take this down. You have copied the look and feel of FlightDeck and are violating our copyright. Open source doesn’t mean you can copy somebody’s ideas and give it to the public. You have a very similar layout and display the same items in substantially similar locations both for the Taranis X9D and the Taranis QX 7 versions. Anybody can look at FlightDeck and see that you have made substantial appropriation of our work. For example:
Artificial horizon on the left, horizontal battery gauge, gps indicators in a square in the lower right, mavlink messages at the bottom, the specific order of total voltage, cell voltage, current indicator and their size, etc…
You took the totality of our concept and work, that made FlightDeck unique and succesful, and used it in your version. This copy will create damages to our sales.
This is a true misappropriation of our Copyright and cannot be allowed.

This is a serious issue. I’m asking administrators to remove this post from yaapu and for yaapu to remove his code from GitHub.

Please see our webpage about FlightDeck


Thomas Lauzon
Craft and Theory

@CraigElder

LOL

I claim that with your hud you just have copied the look and feel of all other gc stations, including the location of the ARMED, which is a serious violation and you should remove your own code
I just forked the github so it stays live and I’m not going to remove it for sure

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We’re not against other people making apps for the Taranis. Developing Passthrough and FlightDeck took us some time and money. By having an app that’s so similar to our design and took so much of our creative ideas, that’s taking away from us and going to make it harder to keep contributing to ArduPilot and OpenTX as we have been doing with code and financial support. Of course, we wouldn’t be here without the great work from ArduPilot and OpenTX and so we find it important to contribute back to both projects.
We welcome people to use the FrSky Passthrough telemetry protocol we created and submitted to ArduPilot for everyone to use in their own apps. All we ask is that the apps are not substantially the same as ours. This layout is our own; it took many iterations and trial and error to find users’ likes and dislikes. There are many other layouts that would work to display flight controller data on the Taranis. It’s great to have another Taranis GCS that decodes and displays Passthrough, however the layout is strikingly similar and that’s what’s problematic.

I think we all perfectly understand that, including me, however I think you need to understand that you have an incredibly poor bussiness model (just watching 1 h of shark tank would have told). You might have created the protocol, but once it’s in the os code it’s os. And the lua script is really nothing special, it doesn’t require any special skill nor any ingenuity, nor is it hard to create. So, as a matter of fact you haven’t created anything special. You claim the layout but I bet you’ll going to lose any legal case on it (and if need be I’m willing to test this, you’re welcome to sue me). So, incredibly weak business model. The only thing you can do is to express you’re unhappiness, but to ask for removal of posts and even of github repositories really goes beyond anything which is acceptable and reasonable. And that’s why I forked it, and that’s why I think your post is LOL.

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I’m not interested in discussing about if there is a copyright violation or not .

I just do not like at all Craft and Theory layout , for me it is a confusing layout, it might be because I’m much more familiar with FrskySport layout and I prefer that layout.

I just hope that finally the open source passtrough telemetry will be available both for copters and planes.

Great job guys !!!

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No guys, sorry, but you if you look at the screens side by side it’s a direct copy of the C&T product, and that’s not fair. I challenge any of you guys to perfectly replicate a DJI or Microsoft interface and see what happens.

C&T have taken a lot of time, effort and money to product a really good, supported product. This is absolutely vital to the Ardupilot ecosystem and professional/non-techie users. It’s exactly the sort of thing that will encourage dji or potential dji users to use something else, who otherwise come to projects like this and see lots of soldered wires and screwing around with files and code, scream in horror and end back up in a dji store. The vast majority of consumers (myself included), WANT solutions you can just plug and play. C&T contribute money and code to the Ardupilot project, have been instrumental in bringing passthrough capability, have contributed significant professional documentation (more on that below), and have generally advanced the capability of the ardupilot project. Copying their product verbatim for free, stating they shouldn’t be allowed to make money from opensource and the have no place here will do nothing but hurt a commercial product that supports our (everyones) opensource project, will discourage other companies from supporting this opensource project, and leave this ecosystem poorer as a result. It’s short-term thinking and doesn’t help the wider project. And I say this as someone who is very open-source biased, and who refuses to commercialise my own offerings in any way.

On the other hand, I don’t think C&T have done themselves any favours by coming in and effectively wiping out the (very good) existing opensource solutions in the official docs to sell their own commercial offering.

There should be space, and respect, for both commercial and opensource offerings. If there isn’t, this ecosystem will not survive - it’s already becoming less and less relevant with each passing day.