Other Mission Planner Features

Other features that aren’t specific to the modes already described in the menu:

  • The Mission Planner Console: When you first open Mission Planner you will see a small window with a black background with a lot of text scrolling by. When Mission Planner finally opens, the window may disappear. That window is called the console. You can keep it alive by checking a box at the bottom of the Mission Planner help screen.

  • Shortcut Keys:

    • F12 or CTL-T - disconnect or connect from/to USB or Telemetry

    • F5 - Refresh parameters

    • F2 - change to Flight Data tab

    • F3 - change to Flight Planner tab

    • F4 - change to Configuration tab

    • F5 - Refresh parameter list

    • CTL-G NMEA Output

    • CTL-W Wizard config interface

    • CTL-P Plugin enable and disable

  • You can display video from your aircraft on the Mission Planner’s HUD if you are digitizing it with the same laptop (with a video capture card or USB device). Just select the device in the Configuration/Planner screen, chose video format and press “Start” to begin recording. If you select the HUD checkbox, the video display will replace the artificial horizon in the HUD.

  • You can also record the video that you’re displaying to an AVI file. Just right-click in the HUD and choose from the menu that will pop up.

  • You can send NMEA (GPS) output to the serial port. Press control-g and you will get a box asking for a comport and baud rate to output standard NMEA data at 2 Hz, to any serial port. One application would be to use com2com to emulate a serial port to use with third party applications.

  • You can have the Mission Planner load non-standard firmware (any .hex files that you’ve made or got elsewhere) to APM by pressing Control-C on the firmware loading screen.

  • Mission Planner can give you audio speech alerts for events that you choose, such as hitting waypoints or low battery. Just go to Configuration | Planner | Speech | Enable Speech

  • Mission Planner can be scripted - see Using Python Scripts in Mission Planner (planner wiki)