Overview

A bit of context...

The existing market for control station software is missing an option that's readily available, easy to use, versatile, easy to customise and develop for, and cross-platform. In response to this need, and fueled by years of inspirations for what a truly great control station could be, Cockpit is Blue Robotics' next-generation control interface, for thrusting your vehicle control experience into the future.

Availability

Cockpit is currently publicly available as a BlueOS Extension (requires BlueOS >= 1.1). It is still in an initial development phase, and will not be actively supported until it is officially released.

The source code is available on GitHub, under two possible licenses.

Primary Feature List

• Browser-based control station software, for vehicle control and monitoring from any web-capable device
• Widget-based layout system, with freeform positioning and resizing
• Custom display Views, for interface pages/profiles that can be switched between
  • Different browser windows/screens/devices can independently select which view to display
  • Views are downloadable and can be shared (json contains name and list of components and widget settings)
• MAVLink NAMED_VALUE_FLOAT/_INT messages are self-registering for use in mini-widgets (including custom ones!)
• WebRTC-based video widget
  • Multiple widgets can be added to support arbitrary numbers of video streams
  • Includes video recording support, on the display device
• Map widget
  • Provides position tracking
  • Allows planning (and saving/loading) autonomous missions
  • Allows mission control
  • In future will allow setting the current vehicle position, and clicking to guide the vehicle to new positions
• Customisable Actions mappable to user inputs (e.g. joysticks, and key presses / screen clicks in future)
  • Actions can send commands to the vehicle, or can trigger local events like view switching and starting video recording
  • Includes support for simultaneous input from multiple sources (including multiple joysticks)
• Joysticks of any type can be configured
  • Buttons and axes can be mapped to arbitrary Actions
• Notification system
  • Displays autopilot (MAVLink STATUSTEXT) and application alerts
  • Includes text to speech announcements
• Mission naming used on the interface and video save filenames