Again, This is a courtesy repost from Kelly Schrock's FB page.
Kelly is a member of 3DRPiolts.com
@Kelly Schrock . He is the Judge, Jury & Executioner of Solex.
If you have bought or have a Pre-questions the program "Solex" & need help, Then Type
@Kelly Schrock he will get your request. You can find him at his FB page or
Solex.
Hey everybody, here's a hot n' thirsty release of Solex, 1.4.9. Here's what's in it:
Inception
There's a new smart shot called "Inception". It flies the copter up and away from its start location, pausing to take pictures at a specific point (and beyond it). It's used to make those crazy-looking "Inception"-style shots. So cool, they even made a movie named after it.
:-D Note that this works best when it's calm. If it's windy, you may need to use
the yaw stick to make sure it's pointed straight ahead (it does its best to do this on its own), or do some correction of the images in an image editor afterward. I was going to use an image from this shot in this post, but I haven't actually figured out how to edit the photos together so they look reasonable. So you get a picture of a Solo instead.
EPM Gripper Action
Basically the only mission action I hadn't included yet, so it's in there now. I doubt there are many Solos out there with EPM Grippers on them, but if there are, that person (or maybe pair of people) can operate it from within a Solex mission.
IMU and Compass Calibration
The 3DR Solo app does IMU and compass calibration, and it seems like it would be nice to be able to do that from within Solex. It has for a while, as a matter of fact. So now you can.
Individual Motor Test
In the Vehicles screen, each motor on your Solo has a "RESET" button that resets the hours for it if you end up replacing a motor pod. Next to it, there is now a "TEST" button that spins the motor at 20% throttle for 5 seconds so you can see if it's working, how it sounds, etc. This is definitely a "take the props off first" sort of thing to do.
Minor bug fixes
Someone pointed out that whenever they changed the Speed setting in Vehicle Settings, the Mission Speed setting would change to the same value after several seconds. I thought that was pretty nuts, and then I tried it myself. Sure enough, it was doing that. The good news is, it isn't anymore.
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Kelly Schrock
18 hrs
Busy day! 1.5.0 is out, before the paint is even dry on the last version.
Fix Inception issue
A couple of people who know what they're talking about observed Inception doing some weird things. In one case, Inception was taking off in the wrong direction when doing a second shot. It was also not updating the sliders to the last-used values (which it was supposed to be doing). Another guy said it was taking off at high speed in the direction of a previously-flown shot. These phrases: "high speed"... "wrong way"... in reference to a smart shot, are indicators that an update should be shipped sooner than later, so here you go.
I tried reproducing this behavior, and haven't been able to. In fact, I cannot understand how it's POSSIBLE for it to do this, since pressing "Start" on the Inception shot generates a new mission and sends it, only switching to AUTO once it gets notified that the new mission has been sent to the vehicle.
So, this update contains a few things that I expect will help. First, it clears the copter of any missions at all before it sends the new one. If the mission somehow fails to send, it won't have a mission to fly at all, and shouldn't be taking off in the direction of anything when it switches to AUTO. When you stop the shot, it clears the mission, so if you somehow switch to AUTO for some other reason, there's no mission onboard to fly. This should also fix the issue of it taking off in the wrong direction, which I suspect was a variation of the same problem (starting a mission that was already loaded).
I had the default Focus Distance set to 500 meters. Oops, I meant feet. That works out to 1640 feet, which is way too far for a default. The default shot height is about 130 feet. The default shot count is now 4, but of course you can adjust it with the "Count" field.
There's some additional speaking going on during the shot. It tells when it's generating points, sending points, and when the points are set. ("points" == mission).
I'll be interested to hear from
Ian Hudson and
Andrew Callis to see what they're seeing with this update.
DroneKit SYSID_THISMAV crash fix
In the "Oh, also" category: This won't affect anyone, unless you changed your SYSID_THISMAV parameter to some value greater than 127. (You would normally only do this if you have multiple machines on the same network.)
There was a bug in DroneKit that caused a crash in this case, fixed in a later version.
Here's a picture of a cool sunset, literally the only picture I've taken since1.4.9 (besides a picture of some steaks on the grill
:-D )
