ArduPilot EU Dev Call 2025-04-23

Development Team
1

Attendees (unique): 17

UTC0702

Peter: Left a review.

  • He’s trying to use bot GPIO and RC9568.
  • RC library could use some love.

UTC0704

Paul: I’d like to discuss with Pete Hall about a comment of his.
George: He’s usually not here. You can try in the other Dev Call or find him online.

UTC0708

Andy: I made the changes Tridge asked for.
P: You’re using ExpandingString.
A: Yes, it’s not the first time we use it.
P: Do you plan to have this string grow very large?
A: No, I use it to limit the size to one line of STATUSTEXT.
Randy: I’d prefer we didn’t add yet another parameter just for the warning rate. But it’s not a big deal.

UTC0717

Waiting for CI.

UTC0720

Andy: Waiting for Tridge to test it.

UTC0721

P: OwnPtr is an automatic mechanism to free memory.

  • But it is restrictive in its usage, also has an ugly syntax.

Rhys: Is it like a unique pointer?
P: Yes, it is. The problem with OwnPtr one is casting. Casting from a subclass into a parent class doesn’t work.

  • Removing it saves us 1k of flash.
  • Lucas de Marchi wrote this for us.

Rhys: The drawback of Unique Pointers is that they don’t play well with exceptions. But since we’re not using exceptions, perhaps they could be useful?

  • Std library has flavours of pointers for casting up and down a hierarchy, but we don’t have access to it in ArduPilot.

P: 3 more libraries remaining to extract OwnPtr.

Sid: Why not have the object as a reference, instead of a pointer? Of course you’d still need to be careful with its destruction.
P: That’s what we’re doing.

UTC0735

P: It’s malpractice to use the AP_Baro singleton in the SITL objects.

  • It introduces the artificial barometer noise into other SITL calculations.

UTC0742

P: Randy do you agree that this PR has no functional changes?
A: Agreed.

UTC0757

Sid: Let’s use a custom symbol, that exists only in the .elf, to allow extract_features.py to work properly for those features that don’t leave features around.

MergeOnCI
Peter accidentally closed the original PR. He created a new one at Copter: Throw mode add params for desired ascent alt after throw by peterbarker · Pull Request #29869 · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub.

UTC0830

ardupilot-devenv VSCode plugin demonstration by Sid.