I’ve been testing Mission Planner on a Raspberry Pi 5. Here are some observations:
Using Ubuntu, Mission Planner requires root privileges to connect by a connection over USB. Not a problem - simply use “sudo”. Raspberry Pi OS does not require this.
Using the Raspberry Pi OS makes things a little bit faster - and more stable.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS works fine, but there appears to be a bug in Ubuntu 24.10. I’ve read that it’s fixed in 24.10.1 but that isn’t available yet on the Raspberry Pi imager.
I’ve run from both just the SD card, and from an NVMe SSD. No doubt, the SSD is faster, but Mission Planner works just fine with just the SD card - especially when using the Raspberry Pi OS.
I’ve tested both USB connections direct to the flight controller, and SiK radio connections. Both work fine.
When Mission Planner starts up it checks to see if it needs to download additional support files - so an internet connection is required. It doesn’t take long, but the first time you start Mission Planner, it appears to download quite a lot.
Once Mission Planner is running, it seems pretty stable. But sometimes it fails during startup. Simply canceling it and restarting it seems to be a reliable fix.
Interesting. According to Microsoft Co-Pilot, you are correct for Ubuntu 24.04. The Raspberry Pi OS however has a different way to manage access to serial ports. The access is controlled with the raspi-config utility. It would appear that the default allows access - because I didn’t change it and it works.
It’s all Debian-based. The Pi utility just does the group management for you. The “dialout” group is fairly standard across Linux distributions, and my answer is correct for more than just one release of a single distro.
Sounds like good info for the Mission Planner wiki. I would bet that I’m not the first person without expert Linux knowledge wanting to give it a try. And even though the Mission Planner wiki has cautions about this platform - it seems to work OK. I picked up a really inexpensive 15" HDMI portable monitor ($79) and had a Logitech wireless keyboard with trackpad on a shelf - so I’m hoping that it will work out to be a nice inexpensive ground station.
My next step will be to see if I can get my VRX to be recognized so that Mission Planner can put video in the HUD. I can always display it using some other program in a separate window - but it’s nice having it on the HUD.
And just for grins, I tried plugging in my Logitech game pad - that works too.
Lately, I’ve wanted to find ways that lowers the cost of operating ArduPilot copters - so it’s more accessible and might help increase the user base.
