Learn AnaTele from scratch

This is an illustrated course. It assumes no background: you don't need to have flown a drone, opened a log or seen the maths before. By the end you'll be able to read an AnaTele report and explain every number in it.

Every chart is drawn from real data: flights from AnaTele's built-in simulator, analysed by the same code you run. The script that draws them is docs/figures/make_guide_figures.py. Some pages also have small interactive widgets that run in your browser.

Prefer paper?

The same material is available as a printable PDF: AnaTele Illustrated Guide (PDF).

Reading map

#	Chapter	You will learn
1	Drones 101	Motors, roll/pitch/yaw, why a quadcopter can hover
2	Logs and MAVLink	What a flight log is and what is inside it
3	Time and sources	Clocks, reboots and why AnaTele uses epochs
4	Flight phases	How AnaTele finds takeoff, flight and the crash window
5	Attitude and tilt error	"Did the drone do what it was told?" in one number
6	Motors and mixing	How four motors make every movement, and saturation
7	Vibration, EKF and compass	Sensor health signals and what bad looks like
8	Rules and their four states	Thresholds, persistence and "unknown is not healthy"
9	Hypotheses	Turning evidence into a ranked list of explanations
10	Missions and geometry	Waypoints, distances on a sphere, "where did it go?"
11	The simulator	The physics model that made every chart here
12	Sharing with .ant files	One tamper-evident file for a whole investigation
	Glossary	Every term in one place
	Interactive widgets	All the widgets on one page

How to use this course

• In a hurry? Read chapters 1, 4, 5 and 9. That's enough to read a crash report.
• Investigating a real crash? Do chapters 4–9 next to the Diagnostics reference.
• Writing your own rules? Read chapters 8 and 9, then Writing a rule.

The one idea to keep in mind

AnaTele reports observations and hypotheses. It never gives a crash verdict or a probability of cause. If data is missing, the answer is unknown, never fine.