Rudder calibration not working

[seandepagnier]

I tried the calibration again today.

first I confirmed that when I click the "port range" and "starboard range" buttons on the web interface, nothing happens. Scale stays =1 non linearity stays=0. There are 2 fields to the right of the buttons set to "31" (editable) and 40 (not editable). These fields have no labels and I don't know what they do, if anything.

I'm going to take a good look at rudder calibration this week and fix the web interface.

Then I tried with the OpenCPN plugin on MacOS with OpenCPN 4.6, downloaded the current plugin version from Opencpn.org. I can't find any rudder calibration buttons in it. I used the "centre" button on the web interface to set the centre, then checked the travel each side. I want the rudder travel to be limited between a reading of 6 (maximum port) and a reading of -6 (maximum starboard).

Unfortunately this plugin version for macos is older than when rudder calibration was implemented.

I also noticed that on the opencpn plugin, the -110, -10, -1 buttons have all change to a value of 42949(big number cut off), presumably the maximum value of an integer. The starboard ones have the normal 1,10,110 labels.

Thanks for reporting , this is a bug.

This all seems rather broken! Is the macos plugin just too out of date to use?

It needs a newer version, the old version might only partially work, sorry.

OK A step forward! Having not had any luck with the web interface or the MacOS plugin, I tried installing the android plugin on my Neocore tablet running Android 6.0. This looks better.

I followed the exact same procedure setting the rudder position manually by hand and clicking the centred, port and starboard buttons. This time it worked and now I get the MIN_RUDDER and MAX_RUDDER indicators if I turn the rudder beyond the set limits. Great!

OK. This is how it needs to work for the other devices.

I then tried using the same Android app to set the Max Current setting, but all the boxes on the "Configuration" dialog are broken. The existing value initially appears next to the Max current label but just as a label, not an editable field. There's an empty editable box to the right of that value with up/down arrows but nothing in the editable box. when i click in the editable box I get a flashing cursor there but no on screen keyboard so i can't enter a value. when i click the up arrow, still nothing appears in the editable box and the value in the label next to it changes to 0.0.

max_current also appears in the signal k screen but the slider is partly hidden behind the scroll bar and there's no visible toggle to slide.

slew settings seem to only be in the signal k view. again the right hand side of the slider is obscured by the scroll bar. when I click on the slider bar it always sets the value to 98 or 99 and I still can't see the toggle on the slider.

So I guess ssh remains the only functional way to edit the settings, but the Android plugin can at least set the rudder limits.

This is unfortunate but is going to be fixed.

Now a bigger problem! The android plugin had set some crazy values like setting slew to 99 (see post above) and there was no way to undo that (Signal K screen has only OK button, no cancel button).

The changes are immediate, and take effect as soon as you change them so no cancel button.

I closed the android app completely and went in and edited the settings with SSH to restore sane values. When I restarted the android app, it reset the slew to 99 again and reset some other settings to bad values too.

If pypilot is running when you edit pypilot.conf, it can blow away the changes you made.

It looks like the android app is storing settings locally on the android device instead of reading the new settings off the pypilot. Worse, when the android app starts up it seems to edit the settings on the pypilot back to match its local settings! How can I force the edits I make to pypilot.conf to persist when i reopen the android app? It is very bad if the android app stores settings locally because I can edit the pypilot settings with multiple devices so they should each pick up the changes made on any other devce and never store them locally.

The plugin should not store locally. Instead you should stop pypilot with:

sudo sv d pypilot

before editing pypilot.conf

and start again with

sudo sv u pypilot


This is desperation. You are meant to be able to use the client.

And one more UI issue. The android version of the plugin doesn't corrupt the numbers in the -10, -110 buttons like the MacOS plugin did, but those buttons don't seem to do anything when I tap on them - the course doesn't change. The only working course change buttons are the ones on the web interface.

Is there any chance you can install pypilot on macosx? I have no idea if it will work, but if it did, you would get the native python scripts (which are even better than the web interface or the pypilot plugin)

In either case, I will get to this week. The main issue is, the web interface needs work, the pypilot plugin isn't the latest version, and opencpn android in general is buggy ui which is difficult for all plugins on this platform.