Pre-flight test and diagnostic

Is there a pre-flight test or diagnostic that I can run with Mission Planner and a Pixhawk quadcopter that will analyze and report any potential problems with the aircraft? There is such a system with the Eagletree system and it is very helpful.

Yes it contains a lot of those. In ardupilot it is called pre-arm checks.

How do you access the pre-arm checks?

They run automatically per default, unless you disable them.

After all these years of APM and Pixhawk, you’d think that someone in the headshed would come up with an organized trouble shooting system instead of the garbage we have to put up with on a daily basis with this stuff. Why don’t they do that rather than worrying about how to get this stuff to work on submarines? Where is the sense of priority?

Pre-arm checks work great. I am confused by your comment…

Mission Planner has user configurable PreFlight Checklists since 2016 more info how to use the CheckListEditor is here.
Those are done by the GCS and you can custumize them to your needs.

The ArduPilot firmware on the vehicle itself does a lot more pre-arm checks. Those are user configurable as well, but default to all checks active (maximum safety).

So as you can see all the features you want are there already, and there is even documentation about them.

@marlinlinger yes, ardupilot supports strange vehicles like submarines, walking robots, and even 3D copters. And yes we do support over 74 different flight controller boards . That gives us a huge user base, of many, many grateful users … and some ungrateful. :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes

Yeah; right. That’s because you’re never seen or even imagined anything better. I would compare the “open source” (“open a bottle of aspirin”) APM/Pixhawk/Mission Planner world to Android vs Apple. Or better yet, APM vs DJI. I have an Eagletree Vector flight controller that comes with an 80 page manual and the ability to connect the flight controller to an FPV screen at the field to give a complete read-out on the ground of the status of the system. If the aircraft is not flyable or something is out of tolerance, it tells you right on the screen. No fumbling with USB cables and unreadable cell phones and laptops and searching page after page of websites (if you can get an internet connection at the field) trying to find out what a blinking LED is supposed to mean, if someone even bothered to document it. Don’t get me wrong, I like the APM/Pixhawk/Mission Planner system, but someone needs to take it out of the 2013 amateur space and bring it into a more professional 2021 space.

Thanks, now I get your point. More OSD stuff. I think you will be happier with the 4.1 release.

But in the mean while, here is the documentation for the LED colors and the documentation for the beeping sounds

I know you do not have internet on the field. But here it is anyway.