Description
Hey all: this is an issue with an associated PR (#1188) that I just put together.
I recently noticed a problem with dronekit and Herelink setups: basically, dronekit will attempt to parse every HEARTBEAT message that comes through, regardless of what type of system produced the message. This leads to issues, as Mavlink allows for non-vehicles to send HEARTBEAT messages (https://mavlink.io/en/messages/common.html#HEARTBEAT -- check out the autopilot field).
The symptom of this problem is a large number of dronekit APIExceptions, of the format (from herelinks):
dronekit.APIException: mode (33554832, 0) not available on mavlink definition
or
dronekit.APIException: mode (0, 0) not available on mavlink definition
I have confirmed that these messages are from the Herelink setup itself. This can be confirmed by checking the mav.tlog produced using mavproxy and cross-referencing the messages. (I can link a gist of the tlog if desired, but it doesn't really provide more info)
Anyways, this has been recently addressed in the pymavlink repository and a fix was merged into their master: ArduPilot/pymavlink#769
I'm proposing a change (see PR) that uses mavutil's probably_vehicle_heartbeat function to ignore HEARTBEAT messages that don't come from vehicles.
This also relates to several other PRs/issues, such as #990, but should be more all-encompassing and robust.