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Pypilot ... how good?
#1
So, I have an Authelm/Raymarine "100" series autopilot with the ST6000 control head. As I am installing OpenPlotter it might make sense to consider Pypilot ...

How good is Pypilot? 

Is it comparable to a modern autopilot?

Will it "scull" large waves like modern autopilots will or is it just basic "try to maintain a heading"??

What about clutch control? my actuator has a clutch and a motor input, will Pypilot support this?

I guess it will be better running down wind than my current autopilot, which tends to "wander off" in a following sea, does Pypilot use the gyros to help with this or do the gyros just stabilise the compass readings (kalman filter)?
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#2
There is a dedicated Pypilot forum here that Sean, the developer, monitors and he can best answer these things. Yes to clutch actuator and kalman filter. There are a wealth of gains to adjust manually to deal with different boats and conditions. One of the things he aspires to do later is to make it more self-adapting to conditions.
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#3
Personally, I plan go with the stand alone Tinypilot. I feel that Openplotter is doing too many things and you want something as crucial as an autopilot to not be encumbered with, or be at risk from other processes.
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#4
(2019-07-07, 10:44 PM)garysmith Wrote: Personally, I plan go with the stand alone Tinypilot. I feel that Openplotter is doing too many things and you want something as crucial as an autopilot to not be encumbered with, or be at risk from other processes.


I’d agree with this. Compared to TP, OP was very slow to respond to helm orders, whereas TP was instant.
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#5
I am using both. Tiny pilot with OP so I can switch between the two. It allows me to have a back up if OP goes down. I connect them via a WiFi


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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#6
I would be interested to hear about comparisons OP vs TP for the autopilot response. My intention is the OP should be fast as long as it's a quad core processor, where TP is fast enough with a single core. It would be interesting to break it down and figure out why, because I didn't think this was a problem.
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#7
(2019-07-15, 03:30 PM)seandepagnier Wrote: I would be interested to hear about comparisons OP vs TP for the autopilot response. My intention is the OP should be fast as long as it's a quad core processor, where TP is fast enough with a single core. It would be interesting to break it down and figure out why, because I didn't think this was a problem.


I found that on a P3b+ the system running OP, OpCPN and PyPilot made the system “busy” to a point of sometimes crashing whilst trying to alter course on OpCPN. The webapp for PyPilot through OP was very slow to respond too, and once you did a course change using the webapp you had to refresh the page to do anything else.

Even when first engaging the pilot it took a long time for the motor to do anything, and initial course changes at startup lagged a lot but seemed to get better as the passage went.

I had a day of trying to alter the gains to make it more responsive thinking that was what was causing the issues but the lag between altering gains and events actually happening resulted in a lot of circles.

When I went back to TP, it was like a breath of fresh air!

Just my 2p worth.
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#8
It would be interesting to see if the critical processes managed to be rescheduled with realtime priority under openplotter. It should not be possible for other processes to delay the autopilot!

The web interface being unresponsive in openplotter is known, the fix is:
apt install python-websocket-gevent
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#9
(2019-07-15, 07:17 PM)seandepagnier Wrote: It would be interesting to see if the critical processes managed to be rescheduled with realtime priority under openplotter. It should not be possible for other processes to delay the autopilot!

The web interface being unresponsive in openplotter is known, the fix is:
apt install python-websocket-gevent


I cannot give any more feedback as I’ve returned to TP and plumbed it all in.
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#10
Funny this spam message brought a thread to my attention I could have used a while back... the fix for the webapp was given to me directly by Sean via email when I reported the problem to him but I had searched here first... There is a lot of info on this forum but it is quite difficult to find a lot of it... it would almost be worth creating as sub forum for known bugs and fixes for them by version/date
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