Overview
Release Date: 9/15/21
Starting Serial Number: 20040
Vision Aerial Flight Deck Mission Planning and Flight Control Software is now available for general use. This new release improves user experience by removing or hiding settings irrelevant to most end users, resolves issues with retract functions, and provides additional safety features.
What’s New
- Battery percentage is mapped to a Battery Discharge Curve that better represents the actual usage of the battery and remaining charge, accounting for performance degradation from cold environments and high cycle count batteries.
- List of flight modes reflects modes being utilized, including: Manual, Brake, Guided, Altitude Hold, Land, Auto, and RTL.
- Removed irrelevant flight modes (Acro, Circle, Drift, Sport, Flip, Throw, Autotune, Guided No GPS)
- Aesthetic changes: Vision Aerial branding added to splash screen, tab with Vision Aerial contact information added, and color scheme updated.
- Removed waypoint types not relevant to end users (VTOL takeoff and transition, VTOL transition and land, Inverted flight, Autotune Enable, VTOL transition)
- Removed advanced settings from user interface. These include:
- Buttons tab, Flight Modes, Sensors tab, Radio tab, Joystick tab, Power tab, Parameters tab, Advanced Flight Modes tab
- Advanced Flight modes (in order): Stabilize, Position Hold, Smart RTL, Avoid ADSB, Flowhold and Guided no GPS
- Items from Sensor Tab
- Removed settings tabs not relevant to the end-user: airframe, power, tuning, and camera.
- On the Safety Tab, added an input box for battery capacity and compass calibration.
- On the Safety Tab, removed the Low mAh & Critical mAh threshold values, PWM Threshold, entire ‘Arming Checks’ Section.
- On the Safety Tab, changed “Throttle Failsafe” to “Lost Link Failsafe”
- On the Safety Tab, changed units to seconds from milliseconds.
- Summary Tab moved to first position and Safety Tab moved to second position.
- If an SD card is present, missions and KML files will save to the SD card by default. If no SD card, they will save to the standard internal storage.
- Added audible notifications of “Mission Start” and “Mission Complete.”
- Increased size of values widget window so user can add more information without scrolling.
- Hide chevrons function added to AHRS/Compass to allow user more viewable map of video area.
- Removed initial “lack of GPS lock” warning during power up and pre-arm sequence because this happens a majority of the time and prevents the user from seeing new warnings that may occur during flight. The “lack of GPS lock” warning will now occur after the initial pre-arm GPS.
- RSSI status now displays as a percentage of signal strength.
How to Upgrade Your Unit
Contact Vision Aerial at (406) 518-1302 or email [email protected] to schedule an upgrade. The cost for an upgrade is included in the SwitchBlade-Elite 2.1 upgrade and takes 3-4 days, depending on the production queue. To update the software without upgrading to the SwitchBlade-Elite 2.1, you can just send in the ground control station.
Top Resolved Issues
- Fixed issue where battery percentage gauge was reporting inaccurately.
- Fixed issue where retracts were retracted on the ground when power cycled and retracts were set as “deployed” during mission planning.
- Fixed issue when downloading maps failed to fetch the elevation data.
- Fixed issue when LRG_STARTUP_BHV was overridden by the Herelink retract button channel, which would try to deploy the landing gear if the user had not manually deployed them during setup.
- Fixed issue when scrolling on the Radio Tab which would snap to the top once per second.
- Fixed issue where summary tab shows nothing but a green dot on Herelink.
Open Issues
- An error message will pop up on the initial startup, “Flight Deck Detected problems with app native libraries (please consult log for detail)” libQGroundControl.so; text relocations.” There is no impact to the Flight Deck software. This is an Android Operating system error that will only be resolved by changes to Android software. Disregard this message and close the error window when this appears.
- On units with cameras running survey missions, photos are sometimes not taken at the start and endpoints because photos are triggered by distance covered.
- When connected to the internet, maps sometimes load inconsistently.
- If the user backs out of the app to the Android desktop, the telemetry may disconnect.
- It is not possible to pause and resume a planned mission, for example, when changing batteries.
General Advisories
- Until the battery discharge curve has been fully vetted, there may be some inaccuracies with battery percent remaining indications.
How to Report Bugs or Request Features
If you have any suggestions for improving Flight Deck, please email [email protected].