How to address/inventory more than 255 vehicles?

ArduCopter
1

Hi there!

Usually, I use the sysid_thismav parameter to identify vehicles. The documentation says the range is 1-255. However, I would like to uniquely identify more than 255 vehicles.

How could I uniquely identify more than 255 vehicles?

Obs: I don’t want to do a light show with hundreds of quads; it’s simpler. I would like to inventory logs of hundreds of quads and their flight details.

A little digression:

Looking at the code itself, it really is a uint8_t, although, at some points, it is already an int16_t as in the Parameters.h file. I don’t imagine that simply proposing to change the type in a pull request is simple. I mean that because, in a very superficial review, it was already possible to find conflicts even outside the vehicle code, arriving at the mavlink itself (mav_types.h).

2

Maybe with the UUID? How to get the Uniue Serial ID of the pixhawk using MAVLINK?

3

If your flight controller is capable of running LUA scripts, then you can send status text to GCS. This text may contain some information about your vehicle (for example your assigned id). This text will also be saved to the on-board *.bin logs automatically. Then you can know which vehicle this data come from. There are also some unused parameters if you are not doing scripting like these. You can use them to extend your vehicle ids. I think these are some of the workarounds without changing the source code.

4

sysid is 8-bits in mavlink; no luck will be had there.

We do provide various unique IDs you can use, as others have pointed out.

5

Thank you for the suggestions! :slight_smile: