ArduPlane based avionics

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a software application engineered to display the state of an aircraft on digital monitors in real time, providing critical flight information to the pilot. It was developed using the Qt framework for C++, taking advantage of the powerful producer-consumer architecture offered by Qt. The application acts as a TCP or UDP client, depending on the desired setup, receiving data from an ArduPilot device, which is connected to the same network, or directly wired to the host computer with an Ethernet cable, allowing for high speed communication between the devices. Data is parsed using MAVLink 2.0 headers generated with the official MAVLink header generation Python application, and the ardupilotmega XML file, ensuring complete compatibility between ArduPilot and the software module. To achieve fluid motion and animation in the QML components, the application uses a multithreading strategy, where a secondary thread running in the background is responsible for reading and parsing the data, while the main thread renders the graphical components. The received data is stored in shared memory, and is made thread safe by using the Qt multithreading functionality. By using Qt, the code can be compiled for both Windows and Linux environments, making the application extremely portable.