I just learned tonight how very little I know about a thing I thought I was starting to get comfortable with. I have found myself in near tears of frustration for entire days over things that where literal non-issues; nothing was ever broken, I just do shit wrong. When I scroll through the forum I see the same thing everywhere; more people like me bothering people who offer nothing less that love and effort for the hobby for simple things that we could easily find if we only knew where to look. The more I look, the more I see the same problems. Drivers. Firmware. Versions of firmware not compatible with old boards that used to run earlier versions of the same thing. Bootloaders. Drivers. Drivers. It looks like Com ports suck for people lately.
I have a little bit of personal experience writing arduino sketches, I’ve written 2 fully playable games in qbasic (that was an accomplishment in high school lol) and I fly a Cessna. Basically nothing that can help me configure an RFD900x to talk to a sik Radio, or make my stupid Matek M8Q-5883 appear as a device that exists in Ardupilot. I’m going to put together a beginners guide, but for the absolute beginner. BY a beginner. The stuff it took me months to work out could be done in a few hours, I just wasn’t aware of the tools, and there is no way for any Ardupilot dev, or anyone who COULD help you to know where you are starting. I remember trying to get multiwii to run; it would immediately close when I pressed read. It was assumed that I had the right Java version/update or whatever, but I did not. We are all on a different skill level, and there is no way for anyone in this forum to know you set the baudrate in ardupilot, but it was wrong in your device manager. So, it looks like there should be a place for information like this. Of course you can find it, but try doing that while you’re frustrated out of your hairline. Try waiting on a response from someone while your hands are shaking mad from following exact steps that lead you somewhere it didn’t lead the guy in the video lol. BUT, try being the person that has to diagnose that… Shit can’t be easy. I could only imagine how frustrated the devs get when they have to reply to 45 people saying “Check that box first,” or “you have to reboot it.” This is shit we should know.
I’ll end my stipid rant, and start putting a thing together. I love Ardupilot, I love Arduino, I wish more people knew what they could do with it, and that it isn’t all that hard to learn. I’m going to make a comprehensive guide to getting unstuck lol.