Dev Call June 11, 2018 2300 UTC

Development Team
1

**Issues & Pull Requests"








GSOC

Funding

Contribution of the Month

Shenzhen EXPO 22-24th June

Plane

  • Fix for Quadplane QLOITER
  • Airspeed fix

Copter

  • Release Update

Rover

  • Release Update
2

Attendee count (max): 25

UTC2301 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8601

  • Detect conflict between compasses on one batch of Here+
    • Two compasses same i2c address
    • Corrupted magnetic fields
    • All sorted out now with these patches
    • Should probably be backported
  • Workaround is to set compass-typemask to disable the icm20498

UTC2307 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8531

  • Tom is in another timezone still
  • This discussion needs Tom

UTC2308 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8492

  • Log plane navigation functions
  • Column name issues have been resolved
  • Gb-init-ignore was also snuck in
  • Should be have a sample gdbinit file?
    • Template for people if they wanted it

UTC2309 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8354

  • Did this get tested in SITL?
    • Not yet
  • Lexton wanted his vehicle to fly slow
  • Michael wants his vehicle to fly fast
  • Did that option go in?
    • Not yet, but it is required
  • We havenā€™t progressed this oneā€¦

UTC2312 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8327

  • Storm32 native serial mount
  • Little bit of work since last week
  • We should jump in and do whatever little cleanups are needed given this is a first-PR
    • Nullptr-checking, that sort of thing
    • FF is hoping to look at this this week

UTC2314 - simplify radio trimming

  • https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8499
  • Report back to GCS if it failed
  • Pulling same result from radio is pointless
  • Why do this rather than setting parameters?
    • MP might have a button to just trim parameters
  • MAVProxy can synthesise packets at the command-line to test this sort of thing
  • On-board radio trim?
    • PR for later
  • This just needs testing

UTC2319 - https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/pull/8603

  • Remove F4Light HAL entirely was proposed this-morning
  • Tridge has been working on F4Light with night-ghost for some time
  • Tridge has been working hard to get this mess cleaned up
  • Night-ghost has made many patches to try to fix the problem
    • None of them have been sufficient
      • 50,000+ lines of code to rewrite?!
      • Still likely to be derived work
  • People MUST take these licensing issues seriously
  • ChibiOS ST libraries?!
  • Proposal: remove F4Light HAL
    • With very great regret as this was an extremely valuable addition to ArduPilot
    • With very talented user-base
  • ChibiOS port will support most of the hardware
    • Will lose some features of some boards
      • Tridge will work on Native-OSD support
        • Will also work on Linux, then
  • Need to make a public announcement expressing regret and explaining what needs to happen to get it back in
  • Exemption?
    • It would basically be a relicensing of the ST libraries as an exemption just for ArduPilot wouldnā€™t work (GPL requirements)
  • License is not a piece of text. Itā€™s a URL!
    • They can dynamically change the license?!
      • Hard to tell what license software was licensed under otherwise
  • Many, many, many other Open Source (inc. GPL) projects include these libraries
  • OpemCM3 was created (and NuttX HAL-layer was created) in response to the Liberty license!
  • ST does have a lot of stuff out there with compatible licenses
    • Core SPL library isnā€™t
  • PR is poking his contacts
  • Contribution agreement?
    • Adds friction
      • Small contributions from new developers will be harder
      • Will slow things down a bit
    • There are tools out there to ease the process

UTC2338 - GSoC

  • Most students have published a blog on discuss
    • Poking the rest
  • Putting together a meeting for all of the mentors for evaluations
    • Skype group chat is a reasonable place to put stuff
  • Ebin has balance-bot balancing in SITL
    • He has hardware
    • Should be balancing on real hardware shortly
    • Desired-velocity controller still to be done

UTC2340 - funding committee

  • Very nice response
  • James Pattison has been voted in
  • Still time to vote ā€˜til end of call
  • [9:42 AM] (Channel) MdB: please leave vote result viewing openā€¦
  • [9:42 AM] (Channel) MdB: not to keep harping on that, but really?

UTC2342 - nominations for contribution-of-the-month

  • Sh83, chobitsfan
  • More nominations welcome
  • Weā€™ve been a bit slack on doing these
  • Give both?
    • Vote to give to both as weā€™ve not been doing this in too long

UTC2343 - new funding request

UTC2344 - Shenzhen expo

  • 1.5 weeks off
  • Conference schedule under control
  • 1 or 2 slides missing
    • Will be finalised in next few days
      • Then translated to Chinese
  • People have been working on exhibition booth
    • Banners are an issue
      • Jani will make and hand-carry to Shenzhen
      • Ideas for design are welcome for these banners
      • 24 hours before work to be started
  • Text for the banners would be greatly appreciated
    • The VTO banner wording
      • Business commentary? Technical commentary
      • Jeff has layouts in front of him but writerā€™s blockā€¦.
        • Contact Jeff if you can help!
  • History-wall will be there
  • LCD TV
  • Jeff will supply list-of-videos
  • https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h1_2G_8xBSOs1fTpaQasGqz3U77YKPNbxTAHC-Pt3Pg/edit?usp=sharing

UTC2355 - qloiter and airspeed error

  • Quadplane and new loiter code
    • Initialisation fix
    • And some new default parameters
    • Will go into second beta
  • Airspeed sensor
    • Vertical lift motors popped on on the Porter
    • Interesting class of error
      • Brief airspeed failure
      • 3 seconds
      • We correctly shifted to internal airspeed estimate
        • We updated a filter based on this value, however
          • Including for the raw pressure
          • Completely rubbish airspeed when the sensor came back because the filter was polluted
      • Be wary of ā€œInfinite impulse responseā€
        • Big erroneous input will affect filter forever
        • Not the case with this particular bug, but something to look out for
  • New beta time!

UTC0000 - Randy and Copter

  • Rover Rc2 is out and being tested
  • Polygon fence fixed
  • Easy calibration fixed
    • Hal-armed flags etc
  • RC8-minimum-below-trim
    • MP sets RC trim on unused RC channel to zero all around
    • Hopefully MO can fix this
    • Does happen on higher-numbered-channels too
  • New beta to come out

UTC0004 - Randy and Rover

  • Still in beta for 3.4
  • Really great feedback
  • Including on vision-position-estimate
  • accel/decel fixes
  • Better pivot turning
  • One issue outstanding
    • Wide turns
    • We moved the speed-scaling into the motors library out of AttitudeControl
      • Restricts the output range
      • Leads to not having good steering control at high speeds
    • PR is in place
      • Accepts numbers outside -1ā€¦1
  • Rc2 should be out later this week
  • Moving scaling to output?
    • Clamping to +1/-1 only after scaling is applied?
      • Not just Rover which suffers
    • Meaning of i-term an change over time
      • E.g. tight corner at high speed == i-term buildup
      • When you slow down the meaning changes?
    • Plane has multiple actuators for same axis
      • E.g. differential thrust and rudder
      • Need different speed-scaling factors for these actuators
      • Tridge is thinking about adding something in servo library to add speed scaling
      • Set-speed-scaling of k_left_throttle
        • Would always be 1
      • Set-speed-scaling of k_left_rudder as 1/speed
        • Would scale rudder according to speed
  • E.g. a swamp boat with two motors and a rudder?
    • Motors library or parameters as tridge described?
    • Multicopter with rudder?
      • Something into motors library
        • Every multicopter frame would need to know about rudders?
  • Will continue discussion in general chat during the week
    • Fun, worthy of debate!

UTC0014 - AntennaTracker maintainer position still open

UTC0015 - expo redux

UTC0016 - make videos!

  • Need videos for things like calibrating airspeed sensors on Planes and the like
    • Nate might be able to put some together
  • E.g. COā€™s tradheli videos
1 Like
3

Really interesting getting updates from these projects.
I just see 2 Blogs atm : @dima and @AyushGaud and @shortstheory
Are there any others ?