Can't access slew settings

[seandepagnier]

Hi Sean,

Great news, I was able to get on wifi ashore and install the new version. It seems to be working - I set slew settings with the web interface and it has not forgotten them! Now I can actually play with the slew values to find the optimum setting. Testing it while swinging at anchor, 10 seems to be a good value and I'm not getting any over-current errors.

Thanks very much for the quick fix.

Let me know if you have any other problems with servo or slew settings.

To work around the missing port number settings for wifi client connections, I tried putting the following at the bottom of bootlocal.sh to create a netcat pipe but it doesn't seem to do anything:

There are not missing port numbers... pypilot never supported client connections, it has always only acted as a server. This is definitely something I could support and it can be configured by the web interface.

Code:

sleep 40
nohup sh -c "nc localhost 20220 | nc 192.168.15.1 39150" &

This is not very robust ( won't work when connections reset) and won't work in both directions.

At the very least it could be added as a service so it can automatically respawn.

The xb8000 doesn't act as a router (won't let me connect to the pypilot by ssh from another client device) as far as I can tell, it's purely an NMEA server which blocks all other connections, so it seems there is no way to connect to the pypilot to debug it while it is connected to the xb8000 (unless there's a way to connect a terminal by usb?).

It's possible to get a terminal by usb but this is not standard. The easiest way to debug is probably a monitor and keyboard on the raspberry.

It's unfortunate the xb8000 isn't a router.. In my opinion an ad-hoc wifi network is ideal on a boat because any device can go down and all the others can still communicate. Unfortunately this is a very unpopular wifi network topology.

When I reboot the pypilot back into AP mode using the LCD menu, it tries to use the SSID of the XB8000. this is a bug - it should have separate SSID and password settings for client and AP modes, otherwise when you switch modes it will try to impersonate the device it was just connected to!

This is interesting! There isn't really an easy way to type the ssid from the keypad. I didn't really worry about it since you can change the ssid from the web interface, and I always used the ssid of pypilot because as a client to another pypilot the lcd/keypad interface provides an additional control head.

I hacked around to hard code a different SSID in bootlocal.sh to be used in server mode, inserting this seems to work as a temporary fix:

Code:

if [ "$MODE" = "Master" ]; then
    SSID="ohana_pilot_nomap"
    KEY="mypassword"
fi

I'll have to come up with a better fix for the future to have a separate ssid to make switching easier.

It would also be cool to switch from ap and client mode without rebooting.

Unfortunately having rebooted of course all the logs are gone so I have no way to see why it wasn't forwarding NMEA to the XB8000.

Can anyone with a conventional router on board who can connect to the tinypilot by ssh while it is in client mode try the nc bridge example above (with the right port for your wifi server of course) and see why it isn't doing anything please?

Thanks!

it's difficult to say the reason without an xb8000, but I suggest using a very short simple python script to do what you want, or eventually I will implement it with a web interface to configure for a future pypilot version.