🎉 *Big News from Blue Robotics!* 🚀
We’re ecstatic to announce the first stable release of Cockpit, our customizable ground control station! 🛠
Unlike other control stations, Cockpit empowers you to create the perfect interface with its innovative widgets system. We don’t dictate the layout—you do, tailoring it to your exact needs!
You can choose from several options of HUDs, indicators, virtual horizons and others. You can even design multiple profiles, for different vehicles and missions! This flexibility will at some point make Cockpit the ideal choice for users of any vehicle type, and for those piloting ROVs, we are happy to say Cockpit is already fully-featured and have been rigorously tested by our team, who have been exclusively flying ROVs with it for the past 3 months.
But we’re not stopping at ROVs. Our next focus will be to better support the BlueBoat, so expect an increase of the amount of features supported for rovers in the coming months, as we continue to refine and expand Cockpit’s capabilities. ⛵
One thing to note: Cockpit currently requires BlueOS on your vehicle, as it serves as the backend for telemetry and video. Cockpit is also available as an extension within BlueOS itself, making installation even easier directly from there.
We already have a good amount of documentation available here. It’s still in development, but we’re working hard to make it perfect.
While we recommend using Cockpit on computers or laptops, as these are the platforms we test it in every day, we’ve received amazing reports from users controlling their ROVs with portable devices like Steam Decks! For that setup, we suggest using the Flatpak version of Cockpit.
Cockpit also supports any joystick controller 🕹, with pre-installed calibrations for many popular models, including the Xbox Controller, DualShock 4, and DualSense.
Additionally, Cockpit fully supports recording videos directly on the top-side computer, including subtitle-based telemetry files. These recordings have fully customizable layouts, allowing you to choose which information to log and where it should be displayed. We have successfully tested it on FHD as well as 🎥 4K videos and invite you to also try it out!
As always, all feedback is highly appreciated. We are making Cockpit for you, so your voice is important!
Ready to dive in? The binaries for installing on Linux, Mac, and Windows devices are available here.
It will be a pleasure to explore the oceans with you all. 🌊
Sea ya!