For some time now I’ve been using droidplanner and more recently tower on a nexus tablet to connect to my APM using a Bluetooth hc06 and telemetry radio, but those softwares aren’t really suited to planes so I got myself a windows 8.1 tablet to install mission planner on and do the same.
However, I cannot get it to connect at all. APM Planner 2.0 connects quite happily but not mission planner. I also tried an old windows 7 laptop, again, that also failed.
This is using the mission planner 1.3.30 build 1.1.5648.36304
It turns out all I actually needed to do was un-tick the ‘Reset APM on USB connect’ checkbox before trying to connect. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be mentioned in any MP documentation, presumably because it’s not expected to connect in this method.
I had googled the problem and there were a few posts that discussed a similar problem when using bluetooth on the APM, so going bluetooth-to-bluetooth, but this was discussed in conjunction with doing some stuff like ‘not powering on the bluetooth for 15 seconds after clicking connect’ which seemed to be accepted was related to a bug/issue in an older version of MP and so I discounted it - fool!