Tower 4.0.1 Beta Released

[billb (Bill Bonney)]

Just a quick note to let people know that a new version of Tower has been released.

You can install it along side the production release to test it out and report any issue you find.

Enjoy, Bill

play.google.com

Tower Beta

DroidPlanner Labs

Tower is a powerful and intuitive flight control program. It provides everything you need to plan, fly and track any ArduPilot powered drone. Tower delivers a simple but feature-rich flight experience. It’s also an open-source app, which means the code is available to anyone who wants to build new features into Tower or customize existing ones. Tower features:* Create flights by drawing the paths on your tablet or dropping waypoints. * Because we give you over 10 different waypoint types to c...

Free

[Chris42]

Hi,

I still have not RSSI data with this beta 4.0.1 (Pixhawk + Sik Radio Telemetry with or without Quanum Bluetooth Telemetry Box for 433MHz Radio Modules + Samsung Galaxy S5).

[rsilk (Robin)]

Can we see the change log?

[LuisVale (Luís Vale Gonçalves)]

[billb (Bill Bonney)]

The commit history for the branch is here of dronekit-android that fixed the problem. I don’t have a SiK radio on hand to test unfortunately (but I had test it previously and it worked)

Build: Update version to 3.0.4 beta

[Pedals2Paddles (Matt)]

Whaaaaaat Great to see Tower hasn’t slipped away into history!

Do you have development plans for the future? Or just maintenance to keep it operational as is?

[Thorsten]

@billb
great news! Thanks for taking over! Very much appreciated!

Tower is a great app! It is the prefect companion for flight planning and flight monitoring in the field. The UI is perfectly designed for mobile devices. And I am really happy that Tower is not aiming to be another full featured GCS. It serves a different purpose and does a great job.

Looking forward to any update!
Cheers,
Thorsten

[marcmerlin]

Thanks for the release @billb
I just tried it today with a bixler2, and sadly on it, I need to recalibrate the arispeed sensor to read 0 before I take off (sometimes it’s far away from 0 that it won’t even arm).
On apmplanner2, in actions there is a way to calibrate the airspeed (which basically changes the airspeed ratio so that it reads 0).
Sadly, this seems to be missing from tower beta, so I had to go fetch my laptop on the field and reset the airspeed sensor, by which point I wasn’t using tower anymore.
Is there a chance to add that missing feature?
Thanks, Marc

[billb (Bill Bonney)]

add it as an issue here https://github.com/DroidPlanner/Tower/issues then it will be tracked

[marcmerlin]

@marcmerlin

I just tried it today with a bixler2, and sadly on it, I need to recalibrate the arispeed sensor to read 0 before I take off (sometimes it’s far away from 0 that it won’t even arm).
On apmplanner2, in actions there is a way to calibrate the airspeed (which basically changes the airspeed ratio so that it reads 0).

Thanks, done: Please add the option of preflight airspeed calibration · Issue #1862 · DroidPlanner/Tower · GitHub

[Thorsten]

@billb Will tracking help?

[1280MHz]

@billb

is a powerful and intuitive flight control program. It provides everything you need to plan, fly and track any ArduPilot powered drone. Tower delivers a simple but feature-rich flight experience. It’s also an ope

Will tower work on a Samsung Galaxy A6 (SM-T580 2016) Running Android 7. I am primarily trying to use it to connect to dragonlink via USB or Bluetooth (mavlink).

Thank you.

[zhangsir (zhangpeng)]

@billb Today, the helicopter is equipped with CUAV Pixhack nano (PX4v4) and Tower 4.0.1beta to test the Follow me mode. The ground is very wide and the GPS signal of the smartphone is also very good. However, when the test starts, click on the Follow me icon, the helicopter just rises to the height specified in the boot mode, but does not follow the location of the Android phone, the Tower’s Follw me icon shows yellow, what is the problem!

Previously tested in 3.3.x, 3.4.x, 3.5.x firmware, it is available!

[TT300]

By the way, this beta crashes on my S9+ as soon as UVC video is attached. The same beta on an older phone (J7) displays the video but the phone is too slow for it to be useful.

[TT300]

Perhaps related to this: Tower is crashing when using UVC stream @Android 6.0

[TT300]

I just tried the dev apk over on the thread I mentioned above (from the post there dated 17 April). My UVC video is working FINE on that apk on an S9+, in both portrait and landscape mode. By the way, I had email with the author of DronePro today. He says he’s essentially halted development, so going forward features like Cardboard/Daydream support for Tower will likely need to be included natively in Tower itself (which would be much appreciated).

[davyg (David Garrett)]

@1280MHz

Will tower work on a Samsung Galaxy A6 (SM-T580 2016) Running Android 7. I am primarily trying to use it to connect to dragonlink via USB or Bluetooth (mavlink).

Thank you.

I have had Tower working on my A6 Tab, managed to arm the quad and start the motors (no props fitted) indoors, sadly I really haven’t had a chance to test it out in the field…have to add that I have no audio notifications working with tower though, but audio works just fine on my Huawei P8 lite 2017.

[1280MHz]

Hi David,

Thank you for your response regarding the A6, I had a faulty Dragonlink V3 BT module so was never able to “pair” then connect to Tower hence the post. I confirm bidirectional functionally via mavlink/dragonlink with audio.

Thank you for your reply.

All the best to you David.

[zhangsir (zhangpeng)]

@billb

Ask the developer to remove the “baidu map” support in Tower and the accompanying map offset correction code as it causes a serious offset in the location when using Google Maps. I don’t know who submitted the code and the map to correct the offset data. This is very ridiculous, which leads to the reverse of the serious positional offset even if you use Google Maps. Please pay attention to the developers, thank you!