Simulator requires GCS to send heartbeat before sending a response

ArduCopter Copter Simulation
1

I am building a GCS with C# and VS 2022. I am communicating with the ArduPilot over UDP. I am having an issue where the ArduPilot will not respond to messages until it receives a heartbeat from the GCS. I have been comparing this behavior to how MavProxy or MissionPlanner interacts with ArduPilot, but they do not seem to be having the same issue where they need to send a heartbeat to receive a response. Any solution or configuration that I could be missing?

2

You’ll need to send the data stream request in order to get the full telemetry.

See MAVProxy/mavproxy.py at 80716f7fc507fbc792fce6b6bb9e4848c01cf207 · ArduPilot/MAVProxy · GitHub for how MAVProxy does it.

3

I am able to receive telemetry from the simulator. My issue is that the simulator is not sending solicited responses in a timely manner. For instance, if I send it a MISSION_COUNT message to start a mission upload, the expected message response is a MISSION_REQUEST. The simulator will not respond with the MISSION_REQUEST until the GCS sends the next heartbeat which could be a whole second. This causes an entire mission upload to take 40 seconds for a 40 mission item file at a heartbeat of 1 Hz. Why is the simulator requiring me to send a HEARTBEAT before it will send the solicited response?

4

The MISSION_REQUEST message is definitely sent independently of the HEARTBEAT. There’s no waiting.

Are you able to post your MAVLink code? It sounds like your code might only be processing some messages, but not all of them.

5

I’m running the simulator on a virtual machine, and I used wireshark to track the messages. From wireshark itself, it looks like this is the pattern I am seeing, so I’m having this problem independent of processing the code. Is their a configuration setting or something that I may need to update on the simulator? Here is a copy of the wireshark as a txt file
MissionUpload_txt.txt (18.8 KB)

6

I’ve also checked this theory by making the heartbeat frequency higher. This wireshark has heartbeats sending from GCS → simulator every 100 ms, and the mission upload is much faster and you can still see the same pattern of waiting for the heartbeat to be received before sending a response
MissionUpload100ms_txt.txt (24.2 KB)

7

Could it be related to signatures?

8

Resolved! I had the signing bit set to true but wasn’t adding a signature. Setting the signing flag to false fixed my issue