QGroundControl

Welcome to the QGroundControl website. This is the home of the Open Source Micro Air Vehicle Ground Control Station / Operator Control Unit.
QGroundControl is based on PIXHAWK's Groundstation and is now developed in a joint effort with the community.

The QGroundControl application is available as executable for the first time as public beta! Please select the appropriate package below.
Feedback and bug reports are very welcome. Please note that the software in it's current shape is full functional, but still under heavy development. We would like to encourage you to submit issues and feature requests to the issue tracker at GitHub [ http://github.com/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/issues ].

Select File → Simulate in the menu to simulate one MAV, then select any of the views in the view menu to get used to the application.

Installer for QGroundControl for Windows 7 / Windows Vista/XP, 32bit and 64bit [ http://github.com/downloads/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/qgroundcontrol-win32-installer.exe ] (Alternative: ZIP file with executable, no automatic installation [ http://github.com/downloads/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/qgroundcontrol-win32.zip ])
QGroundControl for Mac OS X Leopard / Snow Leopard, 32bit and 64bit [ http://github.com/downloads/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/qgroundcontrol-mac32.dmg ]
QGroundControl for Linux (Ubuntu), 32bit [ http://github.com/downloads/pixhawk/qgroundcontrol/qgroundcontrol-linux32.zip ] A Debian packet will follow.
Stay up-to-date on new developments, register for our mailing_list [ http://groups.google.com/group/qgroundcontrol ]
Integrate QGroundControl [ http://qgroundcontrol.org/doku.php?id=mavlink_onboard_integration_tutorial ] with your IMU/Autopilot in a few minutes with the help of MAVLink
Register for this Wiki and contribute to the documentation [ http://www.qgroundcontrol.org/doku.php?id=start&do=register ]

Next Steps

As this is a very early beta, there are some things we want to improve soon:

As the application is not optimized yet, the CPU load is higher than in the final application
The simulation is quite crude and is currently more a testing tool than a real flight simulation (although the shown sensor data is real)
The moving map needs improvements (contributers?)
The audio output on Vista/Windows 7 does not support speech (anyone interested porting the codebase to the MSVC compiler and activating the Windows speech synthesizer? The code is alread there)

Open Standards Charter

There is a subtle difference between open source and open standards: While an application can be open source, it still can support only its own dialect of communications and sofware APIs. This makes it unusable in conjunction with anything else than the software/hardware it was designed for.

This project is therefore actively supporting not only open source, but also open standards. As such, we have defined the Open Standards Charter for the QGroundControl application.

It shall enforce:

The stable and long term support of a standardized communication interface to the micro air vehicles
A standardized interface of different user interface components
Full separation of communications, protocol and user interface
The long term support for Windows, Linux and Mac OS
The long term openness for any type of micro air vehicle

Now why is it important to highlight these issues? Simply because developers tend to overly optimize towards their particular application and thus break support for features needed by others. One example would be that a windows developer bases a critical feature on a Windows-only library. Or that this GCS only supports one particular communication protocol.

As we only have our MAVs for testing right now, we're absolutely open to change the application to support other systems better, e.g. fixed-wing aircraft.

We have developed the MAVLink micro air vehicle communication protocol [ http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/software/mavlink ] to allow others to quickly adopt the QGroundControl GCS. It is a flexible, lightweight open source library that allows to send C-structs and variables conveniently from any MCU (LPC2148, AVR ATMega, etc.) via serial radio modems (Digi XBee, Lairdtech/Aerocomm) to the GCS.

Projects

This website covers the users's and developer's documentation of the GCS. If you're interested in Autopilots/IMU's or general MAV information, please see these websites:

PIXHAWK Micro Air Vehicle Project [ http://pixhawk.ethz.ch/ ] – Origin of this application
DIYDrones Community [ http://diydrones.com/ ] – World's largest UAV community
ArduPilot [ http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-main-page ] – UAV Autopilot Board
Albatross UAV Project [ http://www.albatross-uav.org/index.php/Main_Page ]

Credits and License

Credits [ http://qgroundcontrol.org/credits ]
License [ http://qgroundcontrol.org/license ]

Last modified: 2010/05/17 17:54