Standard Modes Support problems

[DonLakeFlyer]

With the new Standard Modes support in ArduCopter on master QGC now shows those modes in it's ui. There are a number of problems from a usability standpoint with this new functionality:

• The flight mode names are in ALL CAPS. And include things like ADSB_AVOID. From an end user perspective all caps and using underscores in flight mode names is quite jarring in the QGC UI. It's not technically a problem, just not very user friendly from a good user interface standpoint. It's also pretty jarring for existing QGC+ArduPilot users coming from older firmwares where QGC was in control of flight mode names and used Mixed Case everywhere with no underscores.
• Also the list of flight modes is massively long. I don't know if some of these flight modes returned fall into the category of not-selectable by a user. If so, they should be marked as such in the protocol. Also would be nice if there was use of the "advanced" setting in the protocol. Then QGC could filter the list so that it wasn't so formidable at first glance.

[DonLakeFlyer]

Just to be clear, none of this will cause QGC to work incorrectly with ArduPilot. It just makes me a bit crazy from a standpoint of trying to create a QGC which has good usability and a good user interface.

[IamPete1]

• Also the list of flight modes is massively long. I don't know if some of these flight modes returned fall into the category of not-selectable by a user. If so, they should be marked as such in the protocol.

How does QGC interpret "not-selectable by a user"?, we do have FLTMODE_GCSBLOCK parameter which disables setting modes from the GCS, but the user can still select them via the RC transmitter. If we were to mark those as not-selectable and the user changed the parameter I'm not sure how we would convey that change down to the GCS so it could ask for the available modes again.

[DonLakeFlyer]

How does QGC interpret "not-selectable by a user"?

It doesn't show it in the flight mode dropdown for the user to pick. But if the vehicle changes the flight mode to it, the correct flight mode is shown in the toiolbar.

and the user changed the parameter I'm not sure how we would convey that change down to the GCS

1. https://mavlink.io/en/messages/common.html#AVAILABLE_MODES_MONITOR
2. Mark FLTMODE_GCSBLOCK as a reboot required parameter

[rmackay9]

Just throwing in my two-cents, I agree with @DonLakeFlyer that all caps is jarring and harder for the user to read than mixed case (or even all lower case)

BTW AVOID_ADSB is a mode we plan to remove, it seemed like a good idea at the time (a long time ago) but these days, we would implement it all in Lua so it only appears for the tiny percentage of people who would ever use it

[peterbarker]

General agreement on the DevCall that we can change the strings to make them really nice.

Maybe just do what QGroundControl does for these names at the moment.

[peterbarker]

... and FLTMODE_GCS_BLOCK

[DonLakeFlyer]

Thanks folks.