Is Tower development dead?

Ground Control Software Tower
22

So I’m going to “try” to take the approach of making changes to dronekit-android main repo first (also no activity), so that perhaps these can be fixed in the master.

Questions. And this is stemming from ignorance, but I assume there is a really good reason why the android app cannot use dronekit-python instead of having its own version? Can Android not consume (or compile in) python? In my limited intelligence I think “Android is just linux, why can’t linux handle python?” but i’m sure it is way more complex than that.

23

@lordneeko @kellyschrock If you raise PR I can merge them in as I am currently providing support for that.

1 Like
24

already got one in on Dronekit-android. But, fully transparent, I have not tested it, nor am I much of a programmer. it passed Travis CI though! :\

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Yes, a good reason. There is no Python runtime on an Android device. And “Android is just linux” is as about as inaccurate as possible while still being technically true. The differences between Android and Linux far outnumber the similarities.

1 Like
26

yeah, i get they are very different.
The real issue is there is no Python runtime on android… how “heavy” is the python? I remember one of the advantages for why we embedded Lua within our automated testing system was that the Lua runtime was, relatively, small and allowed a massive amount of scripting capabilities to be embedded within our application. I assume if Python could be embedded within applications, there would be plenty of people out there doing that sorta thing.

27

Some do, I’ve seen large-ish C++ apps with a Python scripting engine built in. IMO, trying to solve a problem with DroneKit-Android by replacing it with DroneKit-Python (and keeping the runtime working properly on Android) seems like more difficulty than necessary. But that’s just me.

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It’s a huge task for sure…but dronekit python is being actively
maintained…Android really isn’t…and also is still based on mavlink 1
right?

29

The DroneKit-Android custom branch I’m using is definitely being maintained, and used in a fair number of places. As I mentioned before, at some point between 3.0.0 and 3.5.0, DroneKit-Android developed some crappy behavior that made it unsuitable for apps (at least the 3 apps that I’m taking care of). So I bounced back to the version I was using, and kept using that one.

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Ok well https://github.com/dronekit/dronekit-android isnt being actively maintained.

31

This repo


forked Tower and has a nice looking App. Unfortunately he tells me that he pulled the MavLink support all all new features are going through the DJI interface. Sad, because it look slike he’s making some good functional and UI improvements.