Saturday, November 11, 2017

Tower (for Android) 4.0 and Tower Beta 4.0.1 - GCS Testing

Tower v4.0.0
Well, the first couple of times I ran the Tower GCS, after a few minutes it just quit while it was running and dropped to the tablet's HomeScreen. While later researching Tower for this post, I came across some post by other pilots describing similar crashes. Not sure what's up with this, but it's rather off-putting ... I use Tower during most flights and I can't have it crashing. I don't recall any old versions over the years crashing for no reason.

Since they aren't required any more, I tried a long-shot fix ... I un-installed 3DR-Services, and rebooted. Then, and un-plugged/re-plugged the USB cable for the 915mhz SiK-Radio and answered the prompts to use Tower as default App.

Luckily, it seems to run fine now. I ran in many times and no more crashing (but I'll watch it closely). In fact, it works fine now except no RSSI is shown (under the triangle-looking icon). Just confirming a know bug.

Tower Beta v4.0.1
Installed from Google-Play store and rebooted.
Un-plugged/re-plugged the USB cable for the 915mhz SiK-Radio and answered the prompts to use Tower Beta as default App.
Set my desired Settings and Preferences.

Connects fine and NO crashing to HomeScreen... seems to run fine.
However, there is still no RSSI shown. Interesting, because Release Notes say that it was fixed by the new Developer/Maintainer. I was hoping it would work, but I did read a forum post by another user that said it was still broken for them also.

Hmm. Maybe there is a newer compiled version in .APK file, that just hasn't been vetted or uploaded to Google-Play yet?

There is not really a full manual for Tower that I've ever seen. If you are new to Tower, or just need a little refresher course, these 4 videos by RNDrones seem informative and helpful to me. They might be for a 2016 version, but other than not needing 3DR-Services now, they should work fine with v4.x .


No comments:

Post a Comment

The stupid spammers have now forced me to approve each Comment before it appears (but I am usually pretty quick about it).