Dev Call Jan 22, 2018 2300 UTC

CraigElder · January 22, 2018, 11:16pm

Copter

Rover

3.2.1 beta release planning to resolve this issue: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/issues/7554

Issues

PRs

GSOC

Funding Committee

CraigElder · January 26, 2018, 1:06am

Attendee count (max): 24

UTC2302 - Randy and Copter

UTC2302 - Randy and Rover

UTC2302 - Hiding things behind developer options

Can we rename them to “experimental options”
Zigzag should go in and be marked as experimental
Would be nice to get zigzag and breadcrumb in, even if they’re hidden behind “experimental” (Peter)
MdB: (I mean behaiour in master is not locked in as far as I know until its released)
ZigZag needs the developers to come back to answer some questions

UTC2324 - SILS and gitmate.io

Those at GSoC conference met them (Jaime?)
https://gitmate.io/home
https://gitmate.io/report/github.com%2FArduPilot%2Fardupilot
Easing project management
Just got more funding
Happy to provide free to those that can’t pay
Artificial intelligence that organises your issue tracker
Learns about your tags and auto-tags
Labels things as stale
Finds duplicates
Confidence level that it gets right?
Below 95%
Looking for feedback, which is why they’re approaching us
Adding new algorithms
Lots of active development
Some organisations are already paying to use it
Cost?
Would probably have to be unlimited users for ArduPilot
They’d be OK with us using it for free…
We would manually have to undo changes made by the system if we decided we didn’t like it
Bases learning on the repo itself
On gitter when we want to contact them
Sils to write an email to info@ardupilot.org so we have an email contact

AP_Mission
Do-commands work while you’re flying to a waypoint
Do-commands take some time to run
If you hit the waypoint before a do-command is complete then any others you might have done before the waypoint won’t run
But they may have if the waypoint was further away
This is inconsistent
The PR makes you execute all do commands
Should we run things in parallel?
Doesn’t work for e.g. yaw-to-heading
What happens if you have a cmd-do-delay?
This PR would kill things like changing your camera trigger distance
[10:48 AM] To Weekly devcall: How about we add a cmd-do which turns on the new behaviour?
[10:48 AM] To Weekly devcall: And one which turns off the new behaviour.
[10:48 AM] (Channel) MdB: param based makes more sense IMO
The downsides of not having some cmd-dos execute is bad
Weekly devcall: Or a cmd-do which is a modifier for the next cmd-do which says it must run

Current behaviour is surprising
Battery-failsafe RTLs in auto even if you have said “land”
Weekly devcall: cmd-do’s on the mind - have a cmd-do which specifies the failsafe behaviour?
[10:55 AM] (Channel) MdB: The current behaiour is actually in odds with the docs which is worse imo
General agreement to remove the exception

Touch-and-go
Landing abort does much the same?
This automates the process
Allows you to tune the landing process
[10:57 AM] (Channel) MdB: I objected unless the param is otherwise useful for automated aborts
[10:57 AM] (Channel) MdB:: But that was just my opinion
Led to questions on naming of parameters
List of parameter names common to different landing types
Parameter naming issues are hard!
Wiki page on this!
http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/style-guide.html
GCS don’t like people renaming parameters
Need to worry about future people too!
[11:02 AM] To Weekly devcall: I wonder if AP_Param could have aliases… shudder
[11:03 AM] (Channel) MdB: peter ahhh that sounds bad
[11:03 AM] To Weekly devcall: So if a param lookup-by-name fails we check an alias list or something.
[11:04 AM] (Channel) MdB: get-by-name would probably work, but doesn’t play that well with most param fetch names
RM: THR_MAX_PWM should have been THR_PWM_MAX

Fourier AHRS
Actually a sine-filter
Should this go in the estimator or in the control?
Or parts in both?
Author seems to be concerned the EKF wouldn’t cope
Paul R is the best to look at this
FF: it never starts the EKF, so it might actually be looking at DCM
Having the EKF cope with spinning Copters has use cases outside supporting monocopter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3XAoyv0hcc
Come back to this next week after Paul R has had a look

Needs tridge’s input
Going to bare metal - is this something we want to do?
Nathan from BetaFlight
MdB: No RTOS is a pretty large deal breaker from past discussions, but tridge does want to support the hardware platform
Inside of the PR is use of cmsys stuff from STM which is NOT GPL software
MdB: Tridge, Sid might be able to provide port guidance as well
[11:21 AM] To Weekly devcall: @Nathan if you wanted to talk about architecture / ChibiOS changes after the dev call I’m happy to do so.
[11:21 AM] (Channel) FF: It looks be Apache 2.0 (which I think it’s compatible with GPL 3.0): https://github.com/ARM-software/CMSIS_5#license
[11:22 AM] To Weekly devcall: Also https://gitter.im/ArduPilot/ChibiOS

UTC0023 - Olivier and GSoC

Jaime’s spearheading the effort
Need more backup mentors
RandyMackay: Here’s our proposed project list: http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/gsoc-ideas-list.html
Feb 12 is announcement date

UTC0026 - Olivier and funding

UTC0100 - corralling people using obsolete hardware