The robot page is arguably the most important page in the Dashboard. It provides information across several tabs, accessible in the top navigation bar.
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Heartbeats: these signals are sent by each block in the pipeline (
joystick,altitude,state(estimation),PID) to the flight controller, and are safety signals. If for any reason one of the heartbeats stops publishing, the drone will disarm. Heartbeats can be manually overridden, but this is not encouraged unless you know what you are doing.
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Remote control: this is a virtual joystick used to manually control the drone. It can be used to control all robot “axis” (roll, pitch, yaw, thrust) or just a subset of these, based on the selection of the “Override” parameters.
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Remote control commands: W: pitch forward S: pitch backwards A: yaw counter-clockwise D: yaw clock-wise Drag green ball ↕ with mouse: increase / decrease thrust Drag green ball ↔ with mouse: roll left and right |
Arm / Disarm: Drones (yes, even happy Duckiedrones) have spinning propellers, hence are inherently dangerous. To minimize the chance of accidents, the drone is equipped with 3 arming states:
disarmed (
0): This is the safe state. When disarmed, the motors will never receive commands.armed (
1): This is a dangerous state: When armed, the propellers will spin with idle motor commands, but not receive inputs from external nodes (e.g., the PID control node). Don’t let this terminology fool you though: you don’t want to have your fingers anywhere near spinning propellers. Never arm a drone near you, or when other humans or pets are around it!flight (
2): This is the most dangerous state:and an additional browser-interface-inspired layer of security:
pre-check: this is not a state of the Duckiedrone but rather a human miss-clicking prevention system. Unless
pre-checkis set toclear, the interface will not allow toggling any other state. This mean two consecutive willful clicks are necessary to get the propellers spinning ( 1.pre-check→clear; 2.disarmed→ armed
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