So far I’m extremely impressed with the Blueboat, and we’ve run missions in very bad conditions (25 kt winds at sea) without so much as a hitch. The only minor issue we ran into was the pontoon folding mechanisms collapsing somewhat, which seemed to be fixed by tightening the screw further.
One quality of life issue that would be great would be to get the ACTUAL signal strength in Qgroundcontrol. It seems that, as is, when using the base station wirelessly, Qgroundcontrol reports the connection to the base station, not the Blueboat. So you’re driving around with apparent 5 bars of connection strength only for it to drop out because it’s not reporting on the right thing.
Blue Robotics’s control station development efforts are primarily focused on Cockpit now, so I’ve raised an issue about this in the Cockpit repository.
If you specifically want this in QGroundControl then you may wish to raise a similar issue (or pull request) there, assuming your problem isn’t covered by the existing ones.
Hi @Vincent -
Just to note, in regards to the folding mechanism closing up a bit on you. It is possible to bolt this in place so it can’t fold- a necessary step when cliff-launching!
We’ll have documentation and recommended hardware available for this in the future, but putting a bolt in this hole (orange circle) with a nut on the opposite side should do the trick (and removing the clamping bolt that is going horizontally of course!)
@rjmickle -
Well sometimes the only water access is a bit tough to get too - but as the BlueBoat is quite tough, I’ve not had issue tossing it into the water, nose down, from heights of 3-4 meters! Recovery was accomplished with a rope with rigged-up hook, that captured the cross-bar and let the vehicle be lifted up.
Thanks for the response Elliot. Yeah, I’m not fussed about it in Qgroundcontrol or Cockpit, just haven’t gotten around to using Cockpit yet. Can you also plan missions in Cockpit?
Hi @Vincent -
The mission planning functionality is in development now, but may still have bugs or issues uploading missions. It is planned to be feature equivalent to QGroundcontrol!
