Thomas, don't get me wrong, Spirit works great for me. I have 7 units and never consider any other system, happy with Spirit.
However I consider "logging" in Spirit to be its weak part, especially in comparison to Brain/Ikon. I wonder if something could be improved here.
Problems I see: 1. The solution with storing a log of "previous flight" only if there was some problem in it, never worked for me reliably (in 6 years I use Spirits) 2. Advanced Logging in Spirit GT must be fun, but isn't really useful for diagnosing problems 3. With Ethos we are out if luck as there's no log viewing capability in the field
On p. 1 - Normal logging Few remarks - in some configurations, depending on backup power type and receiver, Spirit will write "previous flight" log even if there were no issues. This is because there are some issues while disconnecting power after flight. Maybe receiver stops working first and Spirit gets failsafe or receiver signal lost. Or voltage becomes too low and Spirit logs that. A lot of weird things happen when disconnecting power. This causes Spirit to log and later report issues even if there weren't any. - I saw many times, even with 3.5 software situations, when Spirit tells that there is "previous flight log" available. But when checking this log, there is just a bunch of "good health" messages and nothing more. No errors. - I had issues in the past that reading "previous flight log" from radio did not clear it. So we were left with no logging. I'm not sure if any of this was fixed. - When powering on Spirit, it indicates with "swash movements" if there is some previous flight log to check. But this indication is so similar to normal swash movement, that is is really hard to notice. - And on top of that, on Ethos it isn't possible to read and clear this "previous flight log". - When we have a crash and reason is unknown, we check in Spirit and have no log. We have to trust that there were no issues Spirit could detect. But it would really add to confidence if we could just see the log, even if there are no errors in it.
All of this makes this system unreliable to me and I just never check these logs and ignore different swash movements at startup if there are some.
Proposition for improvement: -------------------------------- - Could we have an option, at least in Spirit GT to just write all logs, independent if there is any error or not, so we can check them whenever we want? - Could we have these "swash movements" when Spirit reports, that there were some issues in previous flight, be easier to notice? Like, so they would sound different, maybe move swash 6 times instead of 3 or something like this?
On 2. Advanced Logging - Spirit GT - It seems to be made more for fun, to see flight graphs, positions etc. and it's probably great to use. - But to help on finding out what was a reason for some failure in flight, it isn't really useful.
Proposition for improvement: -------------------------------- Could we have these added to the log (if enabled in configuration): - Output values used for driving all servos - any additional info which is available about servos (current, voltage, whatever Spirit can detect) - other outputs (CH0, aux) - anything - maybe some PID error factors? - which would help to detect situations when servo has a problem (for example is stuck) and Spirit can't reach desired cyclic or pitch because of that
On p. 3 - Ethos support This is addressed in other threads already. I'm sure this takes time to develop, but maybe if it is too complex, maybe we could get sth done in community (I'm happy to help).
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