Paparazzi Demo-CD: About to give up before I even started
I started with the live CD. Already I feel that I am too dumb for the thing and I should rather forget about it. I have been using Knoppix and Ubuntu before.
I boot the Demo CD.
Great! there is a paparazzi icon in the panel! Being used to Linux, this is something I call luxury.
First try, just playing around. No luck. Configure, and Paparazzi center starts. Click on help - nothing more than an "about".
Okay, It may not be sportsmanlike, but for the next try I have the software documentation from the paparazzi hompage on hand. ;-)
I select an A/C from the A/C menu rather than creating a new one (whatever A/C means). When I select BOOZE and try to build, I get some gcc error messages. So I try a different one. Sometimes I get a DONE in the console, but mostly it just stops sayng "make: Leaving directory `/UNIONFS/usr/share/paparazzi'".
Okay, I click on "Execute". I get a little window which has an "auto" checkbox and a launch button. No idea what it does.
The GCS is here. I know that there are "strips". No idea what they mean. I can click on various icons. They highlight the appropriate block in the flight plan, but nothing else happens. Should these things happen now, like a circle, a figure-8 and so on? I click on launch, I click on takeoff, nothing happens. The PFD stays solid. In the strips, in the section called AGL (whatever that is) some values and an arrow flicker around, but with no respect to whatever I do. I try to find out what AGL is by using the search box on the Paparazzi main page, no luck.
I have seen the throttle value going wildly up and down, without anything else happening. Now it is red (why?) and always zero.
The interesting thing is, once I made the aircraft move on the map. I clicked on lateral shift and on circle and it was really doing something. I never achieved this a second time.
Hey, I tried again and again and again, but now, I am using A/C TJ1, and I clicked on launch in the strips section, and it did something, then I clicked on figure 8 and it really does it! Cool! Hopefully I will be able to do this again. What did I do before to make it work?
Okay, here I go again. Landed, and then nothing moves any more, no matter what I do. Quit GCS, click on Execute. Nothing works, throttle is red, the airplane is not even visible in the map, the AGL flickers around.
Pretty frustrating. How did you get started?
