Meet the Developers: Michael Oborne

[Chris Anderson]

Today's installment in the Meet the Developers series is Michael Oborne, creator of the awesome Mission Planner. If my memory serves (it's been a couple years), Michael first got involved when he wrote a Xplane interface utility for the original ArduPilot so it could do a hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Today, an echo of that original utility, now vastly improved and enhanced, is the Simulation tab in the Mission Planner.

 

Michael's superpower is the ability to add any feature or fix any bug overnight. It's really quite amazing. I send him an email with a suggested feature or change before I go to bed in California, and when I wake up the next morning, there a new version of the Mission Planner with that implemented! Plus all the features he's adding anyway.... He may sleep, but we've seen no evidence of it ;-)

 

Credit also to his partner, Samantha Nelson, who did the lovely redesign of the Mission Planner. You'll be seeing more of that green and gray/white design in some future DIY Drones sites.

 

Over to him!

 

Name: Michael Oborne

Home: Albany, a small country town in Western Australia.

DIY Drones role: Mission Planner development, HIL simulation, bug fixing

 

Day Job: IT Support for the Western Australian Health Department, across the Great Southern Region.

 

Background: IT with general interest in electronics/flying planes and heli’s, which led to quads and UAV’s

Interests: IT & computers, DIY, Planes, Helis/Quads, Makerbot, CNC, Electronics

[Andrew Tridgell]

Thanks for your great work on the planner Michael, and especially for your efforts to make it work on Linux. Much appreciated! I'm also really amazed at how quickly you add features and fix bugs.

 

 

[Jeff E]

Thanks for adding the simulation for quad. The interface is also getting more and more complete as time goes by. Faster than expected.

[John Grouse]

Great to see a fellow Aussie involved with this project. I'm sure Michael does get some sleep during the hours the US and Europe users start putting up their requests for changes. Wish I had the time to put aside to work on programming projects like this. Starting to wonder if working in IT and and love for all things that fly are the common thread for a lot of members on this site?

[Hai Tran]

Good work Mike.  Didn't realise you were so close.  Planning a drive down to Albany this year (wife's idea, I'd rather hire a plane and fly there myself).

[Samantha Oborne]

Excellent work Mick, he survives on the bare minimum of sleep :)

[malcolm churn]

Thanks for your work, superb :)

[DaveyWaveyBunsenBurner]

Top Man!

 

[avionics]

Well, You are a star !!! your work is outstanding .

 

 

[Kirill]

Good work, Michael! Michael implemented new functions I asked so fast! I had an idea, then told about it him and the next morning I updated Mission Planner and found there functions I asked. Excellent!

[Luke]

Michael and Samantha, thanks so much for all your effort on MP. This is the most visible feature of the APM project and it's beautiful. It's made the whole system such a simple pleasure to use. I can't say how much it's appreciated!