Testing and driving

Before we take it out to the field, we'll want to test the connections. Close the Mission Planner software, remove the USB cable, and attach the USB telemetry dongle to your computer. With the wheels off the ground, power on your transmitter and rover by plugging the battery in, but do not arm the rover.

After starting the Mission Planner software, you may be asked again to find the rover's com port. In your device manager, the telemetry unit should be visible under the Ports tab, this time as a Silicon Labs device.

Upon successfully finding the telemetry dongle, you'll see this screen inside Mission Planner:

After clicking on the Connect button (top right of the interface), you should see your rover at your location. Yep... that's my house.

Let's do some initial tuning and show you how it's done. Before we actually drive the rover, we need to make sure it's not just going to speed away at 70+ mph into oblivion.

At this point, with the telemetry module communicating with the computer, we can do anything we could do with USB. If you go to the Config Tuning tab at the top, it lets us set up some limits for the speed of our rover (as shown in the following screenshot):

Inside the Standard Params tab on the left, you'll find Target Cruise Speed and Base Throttle Percentage (as we saw earlier). We set our cruise speed at 5 meters per second and our throttle percentage at 15%. This way, on autopilot the throttle doesn't go above 15% and the speed doesn't exceed 5 meters per second-nice and slow.

Drive the rover around a lot before ever attempting an autopilot. We'll get deeper into tuning later. But for a rover, these two speed settings are essential. We can gradually increase them later if we wish.