Suggestion: Every vehicle must have a user definable name!

Every babe has a name given by his parents.
DIYdrones (rover, plane, multirotor) are also babies of their developers.
Although I searched through APM full parameter list and Mission Planner user interface; I have found nothing about giving a personal name to our vehicles.

My opinions about the importance of naming DIY vehicles are below:

  • Psychological effect: it will improve the relation between the vehicle and its developer.
  • Data Log Handling: We have many APM based drones and it is hard to manage data logs. We have 6 quadrotors, 2 hexarotors, 3 planes and use different computers as a ground station. For example; when we download telemetry and data flash logs of a quadrotor via Mission Planner, all quadrotor logs are stored in the same folder. Then it becomes really hard to handle too many log files, hard to separate the files. For there is no vehicle distinguishing parameter (except quadrotor, sitl, small, etc.) in the parameter list; Mission Planner save logs into the same folder. For example all quadrotor logs are stored in “…Documents\Mission Planner\logs\QUADROTOR\1” folder.

Just adding a new parameter (ex: MAV_NAME) in to APM stack will be the solution. Then Mission Planner or other software can use this parameter to handle vehicle specific data. In the configuration wizard, the first question may be “What is the name of your vehicle?” for example.

Short of long: data logging is a very important issue, which should be done carefully for better flight results. Logs are generally analyzed very after making flights. I could find no parameter to distinguish my vehicles. So; Mission Planner cannot separate the log files of different vehicles. First; a “name” parameter should be add to APM stack; second, Mission Planner should adopt this by giving folder names or log file names as the “name” parameter.
Best Regards…

Hello,

We already got a parameter to do that : http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/parameters.html#sysid-thismav-mavlink-system-id-of-this-vehicle

That is not what I exactly mean. Of course giving an id between numbers 1-255 can partially distinguish vehicles. But not enough. (by the way mission planner does not recognize SYSID, it still saves all quadrotors into the same folder. Changin SYSID parameter does not have any effect on log handling)
For example, it would be nice to give name “Phoenix34” to one of our fixed wings. Also would be nice to find log files in the “…logs\fixed wing\Phoenix34” folder. Imagine, you run the wizard after firmware setup, the beginning page asks you: “What is the name of your vehicle?”.

I am a research assistant at a public university and may be, that is why psychological effects and data handling concerns me more.

Best Regards…

hummm , I was pretty sure that Mission planner was sorting log by sysid…
It would be better to make a PR about to have the other discuss it !

Yes, as khancyr says, MP distinguish them, when you download logs MP save them in different folders.

Today; I changed the “SYSID_THISMAV” parameter of two of our quads as 4 and 5.
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/B6Q0wBMXtF8REdn
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/Qko7WyoZG0FstFd

I fully erased “…Documents/Mission Planner” folder.
Reinstalled Mission Planner (MP).
Then I downloaded all data flash logs of each quad by “Log Downloader”.
Realized that MP created seperate folders (4 ,5) in “…Documents/Mission Planner/logs/QUADROTOR” folder. Downloaded logs into different folders. That is ok.
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/cOwwU9Mgxtl2SSB

But, every time I connected to quads after changing SYSID of them, there appeared “Bad Logging” warning in the HUD.
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/7JnAHW2o2vtB63F
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/eJo5yFGAQwT5iUr

When I checked the log folder, MP saved telemetry logs of each quads into the logs folder.
https://bulut.marmara.edu.tr/index.php/s/cN6xj345WCVIHfc
Instead, MP should saved them into the folders named “4” and “5” seperately. I think, MP is looking for a folder named “1” under the “…logs/QUADROTOR” folder and when MP cannot find “1” folder; it gives a warning “Bad Logging”. (Default telemetry logging folder is “1” I think.) So there is an issue in telemetry logging.

Anyway; I still believe that to be able to give private names to our MAVs would be a better idea, than giving them just an id number between 1-255. This is suggestion and will for our Ardupilot based project numbers are increasing. It is getting harder to handle data logs, config and waypoint files etc.

Best Regards and appreciate for your efforts in this project…
Baris

Did anything ever come of this? I am in a similar situation at a university and we have dozens of arducopter based drones and need to store and organize logs for FAA waivers (in addition to the obvious reasons).

I ended up with a paid third-party log book service that I upload the log files into. I can associate each flight with a drone and a pilot, and it will automatically read all the data from the log to populate locations, flight times, etc. It also addresses all the other drone manufactures and flight controllers we use besides Ardupilot.

That’s actually quite a coincidence because last night I was setting up our drones in drone log book and was looking at the log upload function which lead me to googling and finding this thread.

The issue we have is we might do 10 -15 flights in one day on 5 different be identical drones so it would be really easy to get the files mixed up and of we did a bulk upload there would be no way I know of to distinguish what log went with what drone.

I understand. For the Ardupilot logs I do bulk uploads by drone. This works for me because it’s (usually) one pilot per drone. It’s not too bad because even if I could upload all the logs from different drones at one time I’d still need to go back and edit the pilot information. But I agree, it would be good if it would at least recognize what drone it is just based on the logs.

I’ll try what the older post did and see if I can get mission planner to at least seperate the logs into different folders when uploading. But we will need to find a more robust solution eventually once we start having our “regular” pilots flying these.

If I can get a compitent coder with some free time we may put them on this, also may talk to the folks at drone log book and see if we can figure out some more automated way of uploading them.

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