"free" items for custom use?

Ground Control Software Mission Planner
1

Hi, I’ve just started learning AP for dev purposes. In the “Quick” tab, if I double click an item to change it, I get a huge list of items. I am looking for a parameter that is basically “free” and not used by anything in the copter sim, so that I can later use it for my own purposes e.g. update its value via MAVROS. Any guidelines?

2

You can add items to the list by sending NAMED_FLOAT mavlink messages from the AP to MP. They will be added based on the string in the message. (Up to 10 different name).

3

Thanks, I tried “publishing” a test message through the only interface I saw that allows passing NAMED_VALUE_INT:

ros2 topic pub /mavros/debug_value/debug \
mavros_msgs/msg/DebugValue \
"{header: {stamp: {sec: 0, nanosec: 0}, frame_id: ''}, index: -1, array_id: -1, name: 'MyDebugValue', value_int: 42}"

It seems to publish the message every second, non-stop.

Now, I tried to find this data in MP GUI but could not… do you know where it’s supposed to show up?

4

It must be NAMED_VALUE_FLOAT mavlink message, NAMED_VALUE_INT does not handled.
I’m no familiar with ROS, but it seems that the DebugValue does handle named_value_float as well…
http://docs.ros.org/en/noetic/api/mavros_msgs/html/msg/DebugValue.html

5

Thanks… assuming it is a raw low-level message as you describe, where should it be possible to see the sent values in Mission Planner?