Recommendations for a laptop PC compatible with Mission Planner

Ground Control Software Mission Planner
1

Hi,

I need to get a new laptop and want to get one that is capable of supporting Mission Planner and Gstreamer video in the Mission Planner HUD.

What are the minimum specifications that will give me good service with Mission Planner?

Thanks,

Paul

2

Ok, I’m thinking about a Dell laptop with 8GB RAM, a 2.8GHz CPU and a screen resolution of 1980x1080.
But a machine like that costs about $900.

I want to know how low I can go without having problems supporting Mission Planner. I was hoping someone could tell me that a $500 machine will easily do the job.

Thanks,

Paul

3

I had a used Dell Latitude e4300 and MissionPlanner with gstreamer in an extra window was running fine. 2.4GHz and 2Gigs of RAM.
Right now MissionPlanner is running on my i5 6900k 16gigs. CPU clocks at 1GHz and Missionplanner is using 2.5% CPU and 165MB of RAM max at the Flightdata screen. No gstreamer running right now. But since every modern GPU can decode h.264 in hardware, it should not change much.
I think, a bright non-glossy screen and battery life is much more important, if you plan to use the laptop on the field, than hardware overkill.

4

Thank you Sebastian.

Does a high resolution screen matter? I use a Navio2 with a 1080p Pi camera. do I really need to get a 1920x1080 resolution screen then?

Thanks again,

Paul

5

Hello Paul.
You will have better experience with higher resolution. Camera capture wont take full screen, only HUD as You said, so with higher resolution for MP, You will have less saturated video stream, because when You stream 1080p to something like 600x400 px, image will be too grainy. Also take a look at the size of screen of laptop. I have 15 inches, go to the retail store and take a look at them, probably 15’ will be the most comfortable, 14’ will be too small, and probably have max resolution of 1366x768 px, 17’ will be too big and this laptops usually weights a lot.
As Sebastian said, MP doesn’t need a lot of resources, only decoding of video will take it. I think that Intel Core i3 will be enough too for MP + video decoding. So You can finish with cheaper than 500$ machine.
Regards, Nikita.

6

Thanks Nikita,

Ok I understand what is needed. What I want to learn are tradeoffs in quality, ruggedness, weight and price.

Thanks again,

Paul