We are currently setting up our navigator flight controller and we don’t know what the status light means. We have seen it turn red, yellow and blue. I am guessing blue means that it is good but I am not sure what the other colors mean. Could you explain what the other colors mean please?
Hi @cece,
We don’t yet have documentation for the ArduPilot status light in ArduSub, but I looked into the code and the colour definitions are here.
From a reasonably quick look, they seem to match the visual displays in the current ArduCopter documentation (which should be the case, unless ArduSub or the copter docs are outdated, since the light flashes are a shared library used by all the firmware types).
Note that solid or flashing blue (with no other colour) means there’s no GPS fix (while armed or disarmed respectively), which is usually the case for ArduSub vehicles (since they tend not to have a GPS installed).
My new unit upon activating has a flashing blue LED. Can this be turned off if I do not use a GPS?
Hi @bajaMike,
You can change the brightness of the status LED (including turning it completely off) using the NTF_LED_BRIGHT parameter of the autopilot, which can be modified through the Parameters page in QGroundControl, or in recent BlueOS 1.1 beta versions.
Note that the LED indicates much more than just the GPS state (e.g. it also indicates the armed state, and whether there’s a failsafe event occurring), so it’s generally recommended to keep on if your vehicle allows you to see it.