Hi Francisco. Fair questions.
With respect to your first question, you pretty much said it. It would benefit ArduPilot and the community by making it work better with Ardupilot. With respect to Solo, specifically: Solo is, especially with the efforts of the Open Solo initiative, a de facto Ardupilot RTF, with a large deployed base. And pretty much the only RTF at that functionality and price point. Edit: Just saw Mike’s response. Can’t further address the question better than he did!
StorM32 is quite unique:
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It’s inexpensive, ~$25 (compare to AlexMos for instance. at 3-5x the price), especially for what it does, and uniquely integrated with Ardupilot.
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It is very popular and enjoys a very strong following among the Ardupilot community. See for instance related threads on RCG, lots of interest and user/developer interactions. Close to one million views, over 10,000 posts on the main thread on RCG alone, for instance. (More views there, actually, than the main Pixhawk thread itself). And over 2500 posts and replies from the developer.
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There is a strong need for it, and it fills a space in an area (aerial photography and video, gimbal control) fairly weak within the Ardupilot ecosystem. It extends Ardupilot possibilities, with its versatility allowing anyone to extend vehicles capabilities with gimballed cameras, from Mobius to Gopros to point and shoots to DSLRs. Applications besides pure photo and video include mapping, search and rescue, agriculture, etc …
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It is uniquely positioned to leverage Solo’s SmartShots.
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Storm32 is the result, as far as I know, of work by one single individual, who designed it, (both hardware and software), made it available at or close to cost, and who extensively supports it, for free. This is quite different from many other similar peripherals, offered with higher profit margins (nothing wrong with that, of course) and low or inexistent support.
In summary, I think we should encourage and assist such unique efforts, when possible and of course on a case by case basis.
Btw I haven’t talked to Olliw. I just saw that thread quoted in proposal, user issues and Olli’s response. For all I know he could decline if this was accepted! But I am somewhat confident I could take care of that. 