Diagnostics/status meassages from FC to GCS are easy to miss

[tkoivuro]

Background:

We are utilizing Arduplane and several different vendor FC hardware to fly BVLOS mapping missions with both traditional fixed wing planes and VTOLs. CGS is running MissionPlanner.

What i would like to improve:

Telemetry connection between FC and CGS is not always perfect, as well as person who is sitting in front of the computer is not perfect. If telemetry connection is unstable as it sometimes happens, things like EKF lane switches, Airspeed sensore failures or GPS primary changes may go completely unnoticed by the person who is monitoring the flight at the CGS computer. Also our typical missions are 100s of waypoints long (1-2 hour flight time) even with perfect telemetry these messages tend to get lost between all waypoint reached messages.

If the sensor configuration (Actice EKF lane, Primary GPS, Primary air speed source etc) changes during the AUTO mission the FC should constantly send some sort of warning message to GCS that could not be missed even if there is only very little telemetry connectivity. Also there is no way to tell if Q assist has been activated in VTOL plane during the flight which annoying. Q assist is great helper but flight team needs to know if it has been activated. It is set in a way it sould never activate if things are going well.

Currently we are utilizing companion computer on board that picks up these messages from mavlink data stream before it gets sent to the telemetry radio but this is pretty complicated and heavy solution for something that should run inside of the FC.

Platform [ x ] All [ ] AntennaTracker [ ] Copter [ ] Plane [ ] Rover [ ] Submarine

[peterbarker]

This is essentially what the "mavlink events interface" is for: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/17244

[muramura]

I am thinking of a pop-up and voice notification in QGC that would be easily recognizable to the operator. Two more things I would like to realize are condition LED indication and alarm in QGC.