Dev Call Feb 19, 2018 2300 UTC

Development Team
1

Un Conference Update

Issues

Pull Requests


Funding Committee

Contribution of the month

2

ArduPilot Dev Call 2018-02-19

Attendee count (max): 13

UTC2301 - Conference roundup

  • Started very early
  • All talks videoed
  • Multi-camera setups
  • Talks on estimate, control, chibios, hardware, LUA scripting…
  • Follow mode demos
  • Reverse thrust plane landing demos
    • 40-degree glide slope
    • Prompted the thought of custom landing modes for TVBS
  • Lots of people still travelling back home from conference
  • Flew a couple of new TVBSs
  • Chaotic but fun
  • Paul’s mini plane
    • 100g 18m/s
    • Tridge got to fly it!
    • Power is the problem
      • Linear voltage regulators
    • Stripped-back PixRacer
    • Handled a surprising amount of wind
    • Scratch-built
  • CrazyFlie tethered flight
    • Internal sensors on i2c
    • External SPI
    • Weird telemetry encapsulation
  • Awesome to see people in person
  • A little later next year
    • March?
  • China conference and Hex China conference (Hex is now probably October) and potential InspecTools on West Coast of US

UTC2329 - Safety switch

  • https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/issues/7732
  • Arming switch is an IO processor thing (where possible)
  • ARM state is a main-processor thing
  • Supposed to be orthogonal
    • All four are perfectly valid states
    • Michael added a mechanism to get into one of the states
  • This isn’t going to change
  • Safety switch was to stop actuators/motors
  • Control loops start running when moving to Armed state
    • AP starts to try to fly the aircraft
    • Logging starts
    • Ramp-up of throttle starts
  • MdB’s use case
    • GPS glitch could trigger props
  • Why not have safety switch arm vehicle?
    • Workflow, you need to be able to see arming errors
      • And then you’re not looking at props
  • PX4 states
    • Just arms/disarms based on buttons?
  • Could add some state-changes based on button press
    • E.g. pressing button will disarm vehicle
  • Two bits are sent to GCS
    • Armed and safety bit state
    • This changed a couple of years ago

UTC2347 - preflight storage

  • https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/7718
  • Don’t reboot
    • Go into a wait-for-reboot loop
    • Much like the sensor failure thing
  • Don’t reboot the board directly
  • Param erase all will not change in-memory values
    • Which is probably a good thing
  • Would be nice to implement the mission-erase thing as well

UTC2349 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/7711

  • Not sure if it required but won’t harm

UTC2352 - Heli

  • CO’s series of 4 wonderful videos
  • CO will also redo tradheli wiki

UTC2353 - Partners

  • Old contribution-is-donation from potential partner
  • Another vote on partnership?
  • Would be “new partner”
  • Need to make clearer to partners what the benefits are
  • Need to remind people of summary of story
    • Link to previous discussion on mailing list

UTC0003 - swag in Canberra

  • Nice stuff
  • People bought directly
  • Stickers!
  • Very popular
    • Selling to the converts….

UTC0005 - contribution of the month

  • Congrats to night-ghost!
    • For F4Lite HAL
    • Anybody know of some good git documentation in Russian?