Mikrokopter Looking for tips on using the SD data slot

MombasaFlash

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
I don't find any info on how to setup the SD card to record flight data. Does the SD card have to be formatted first? If so how?

After inserting the card and turning on the AD-8 for a bit a single 32kb file is produced called < SETTINGS.INI >. I have no idea if it actually contains any useful information because I do not know how to access it. I have the MK_GPX_MDI_0102_beta program (supposed to be for FC 0.86 as I understand it) but don't know how to get it to do anything.

Some of you obviously use the SD card data feature, how is it all supposed to work?
 

T

Tahoe Ed

Active Member
MombasaFlash, in two years of flying an MK I have never had to access the SD card, but I have not crashed. There are references on the MK.de site as well as mikrokopter.usa site.
 

ZAxis

ZAxis

Member
Today we've just started to use the SD card to log flight data after a year or more without and it just worked.
First you do need a micro SD card that is 2Gb or less. I did try a 4 Gb one and it did not work even if formatted into 2 x 2Gb partitions.
The one we use is made by Samsung.
I used the card with no extra formatting, just plugged it into the NavControl card slot. The Hexa was then initialised and started up as normal.
Without taking off, I shut the Hexa down, took the SD card out and plugged it into a netbook running WinXP. At this time just the Settings.ini had been created.
This contains parameters to set the data read rate and it was left untouched.
So far so good. Put the card back in and made a couple of GPS aided flights. Took the SD card out and plugged back into the netbook. Now an extra folder called LOG had been created.
Inside this folder was another with the date as its name. Inside that were two folders GPX and KML. Inside each of these folders are files that had been created during the flights. GPX and KML are just different formats used to store the flight data. GPX seems most useful.
So we now had the data, what to do with it ?
Downloaded Google Earth and installed it on my MacBook Pro. Opened one of the GPX files and immediately got the flight track plotted out.
To get at detailed flight data I had to move back to the netbook and use the Windows only downloaded MK-GPX program. This defaults to German (surprise !!!) but can be set to English from the Optionen / Einstellung menu. Look for the Sonstiges tab and select English. Opening a GPX file gives a screen full of tabular data on the GPX-data tab and graphs of some parameters on the Evalution tab.
There are a whole stack of parameters logged, everything you would ever want to look at. Just need to figure out what the significance of it all is.
You can also track every data point and have a set of on screen flight instruments display compass/artificial horizon/Altitude/Climb values.
Its early days for us but it does look like a really useful tool.

I hope this helps
andy
 
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MombasaFlash

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
Brilliant reply Andy, thanks.

I log CARVEC flights with the big heli and it useful to track general performance, temperatures etc. I would like to have access to similar data with the MR, instead of hooking up a laptop and trying to keep an eye on temperatures in real time, for example. More convenient to log it and check it afterwards. One can then establish what is 'normal' for the particular machine. Being able to log and graphically display a flightpath is a handy facility.

Thanks once again. I will slot the card in and try a flight.

Gray
 

Meez

Meez

born to fly
During testing Autonomous waypoint flying and after landing and back home then only i realised that i didn't put SD Card on the Navi. Yea maybe it use for record the flight data but not the waypoints. Maybe the Navi also have small capacity for data storage.

After a while doing only normal flying, i get bored. Yesterday i connected my xbee 900, use my OSD, set a waypoints and go to fly. Wow, what a relax flying and watching my Quad doing Autolanding give me a long smile during drive to home.
 

MombasaFlash

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
I forgot all about the SD card in the slot. Just today I took it out to see if flight data had been recorded using the MK-GPX program.

Whoopee. Data.

Oh no, Windows whoopee.

OMG. What typical Windows rubbish. There is no way to get it to default to user settings, so every time it is opened you have to resize the window, select the language, choose the display method, choose the folder to read from or write to ... yeukhh.

Aha, let's be clever ! Let's just export it straight away into a csv file. Nope. That doesn't work either. The different columns are all there but the data itself is not column delineated and it is crushed up into one huge indecipherable cell.

IF anyone knows how to get it to accept user default settings or export with a proper csv file (in other words behave properly - like a Mac, for example), I would be very grateful to know what the trick is.
 

ZAxis

ZAxis

Member
MombasaFlash said:
I forgot all about the SD card in the slot. Just today I took it out to see if flight data had been recorded using the MK-GPX program.

Whoopee. Data.

Oh no, Windows whoopee.

OMG. What typical Windows rubbish. There is no way to get it to default to user settings, so every time it is opened you have to resize the window, select the language, choose the display method, choose the folder to read from or write to ... yeukhh.

Aha, let's be clever ! Let's just export it straight away into a csv file. Nope. That doesn't work either. The different columns are all there but the data itself is not column delineated and it is crushed up into one huge indecipherable cell.

IF anyone knows how to get it to accept user default settings or export with a proper csv file (in other words behave properly - like a Mac, for example), I would be very grateful to know what the trick is.
Click to expand...

The Windows GPX reader is a pain to use but the only way to easily interpret the data. I have found you can open the data file using MS Excel 2010 Starter on a Windows7 PC and get tabular data so I tried Excel2004 on the Mac and it presented the same undelineated rubbish you saw. I wonder if the latest Mac Excel version would be more successful since the file does seem to be in XML format and later versions of Excel are made to handle it. I just don't want to throw more money at MS to try it out but may well be forced to since MacOffice2004 will not work under OSX 10.7 Lion.

andy
 


MombasaFlash

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
Well yes, I know. You're right. I'm just being a Machole. But it is still annoying that so many programs built on the already rather clunky Windows platform are so poorly finished. The resulting tiresome user experience is something that Mac users are not generally accustomed to.

The new v.88 release looks like a nice steady upgrade. I cannot get Google to translate the page for some reason but it looks like most new features address more comprehensive control over waypoint flight. A very sensible addition is that BL current and temps are now displayed on the OSD screen, thus eliminating the fiddly change to FC data display in the main MKTool window and the temporary freeze of NC data.

PS. the correct spelling of the latin expression for "in (or by) itself" is per se
 

G

ghaynes

Member
I am also a Mac user but find that the emulator "Wine" runs the two GPX viewers just fine without having to start up Parallels or Fusion.

Andy just tried Mac Office 2011 and just get a line after line listing with <> as the data brackets. Even though it says in the header that it is an XML format even the MS Mac tool Open XML Converter doesn't open it.

So give WINE a try. Runs through Terminal. winebottler.kronenberg.org
 
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MombasaFlash

MombasaFlash

Heli's & Tele's bloke
Excel permits graphs and charts to be easily generated from highlighted columns and this is handy for quickly comparing the performance of parameters. I use this facility when viewing CARVEC flight log data. The MK GPX program sets out all the data (after you have manually adjusted screen size, window layout, language etc. - every single bloody time) and so BL temps can be found easily enough or compass heading etc. but, for example, comparing Pitch and Accel Pitch data needs a chart and without the facility to export 'proper' csv files for opening in an Excel chart its usefulness is very limited. Really annoying.
 

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