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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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  • Heartbeat monitors: the drone requires heartbeats to fly, as a safety measure. Heartbeats act as a “dead man switch”, i.e., if heartbeats are lost for any reason the drone disarms.

    Heartbeat monitoring can be disabled on each individual signal, but it might cause catastrophic outcomes. Don’t disable heartbeat monitoring unless you really know what you are doing.

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Image Added

  • Time-of-flight (ToF) sensor: the time of flight sensor measures distance.

    • It has a minimum range and maximum ranges associated with the mode of operation. The default settings provide measurements between (0.03-1.2) meters.

      • Status
        colourYellow
        titlegood bug
        ToF measures 1-2cm when the minimum should be 3

    • ToF data is collected at 30 Hz. Mission control streams at 5 Hz by default.

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  • Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) - Orientation: the IMU includes an accelerometer and gyroscope, measuring linear and angular accelerations. This data is combined to show the drone's orientation (roll, pitch, yaw), expressed in degrees.

    • IMU data is measured in the 2-3 kHZ kHz range on the flight controller, provided to the Raspberry Pi at 22 Hz, and rendered in Mission Control at 5 Hz.

    • The “Calibrate IMU” button can be used to reset and remove bias from the measurements. The data will be saved in the configurations folder and propagated to autonomous nodes too.

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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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  • 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-check is set to clear, the interface will not allow toggling any other state. This means two consecutive willful clicks are necessary to get the propellers spinning ( 1. pre-checkclear; 2. disarmed → armed

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Info

Remote control commands:

W: pitch forward

S: pitch backwards

A: roll left

D: roll right

Drag green ball with mouse: increase / decrease thrust

Drag green ball with mouse: yaw counter-clockwise and clock-wise

Spacebar: emergency stop (disarms the drone)

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Troubleshooting

Problem: The power button does not generate the intended outcome.

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