major update to ArduPilot master

[Andrew Tridgell]

Hi All,

I have pushed a major update to ArduPilot master. This update includes
two main things:

- a merge of almost all of upstream px4/Firmware master

- support for the new XRacer board

While this code has been test flown (thanks Randy!) if you are flying
master then you should do careful ground tests, and please report any
abnormalities you notice. It would not be surprising to find some
regressions over the next few daya.

The merge of upstream px4/Firmware includes everything except uavcan. We
are still using the older uavcan while support for some existing devices
is sorted out. Moving to the newer uavcan release will be much easier
after this merge however.

Support for the XRacer board is preliminary, but it has been test flown
several times with good results. To build for the XRacer you need to do:

make px4-v4

as the XRacer is a FMUv4 architecture, not FMUv2 like the Pixhawk.
We don't yet do autobuilds of FMUv4. That will probably be added later.

The XRacer port does not yet support SBUS or DSM for RC input, although
it does support PPMSUM. Work is underway to add SBUS and DSM support. We
also have not yet tested CAN on XRacer, so you should assume that is not
working yet.

Many thanks to the PX4 dev team for all the changes in this update, and
to Philip and Nick for their support in the XRacer port and to Lorenz
for the fun bringup hacking sessions we've had getting XRacer
going. Also big thanks to David Sidrane for laying the groundwork for
the FMUv4 architecture.

Note: you will need to do a "git submodule update" after update your git
trees to this release.

Cheers, Tridge

[Randy Mackay]

In case people haven't seen the xracer before:
Blog post introduction: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/ardupilot-px4-communities-diy-hardware-innovation-is-still-alive
Video of my flight with it in an IRIS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNlDeSOwWi0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOPct6cba4g

Once we get the automatic firmware builds going we will need to add support in the ground stations to recognise the xracer from its bootloader so it can load the appropriate firmware.

As an editorial note, one thing I really like about the XRacer is that it's hardware was designed with close interaction with the ardupilot and px4 dev teams (Lorenz, Tridge, Leonard, etc) and with a very specific market in mind (the 250 quad market). Hardware is hard and often the projects suffer from either too much input (i.e. too many cooks) or too little. I think this one got the balance just right.

-Randy

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "drones-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to drones-discus...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Andy Little]

The x-racer board certainly looks great.  

Would be even sweeter with an OSD onboard :)

regards

Andy

[Hamish Willee]

Hi Randy 

Is it too early to add instructions to the wiki for building for xracer?

I was also wondering if we might update http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/building-the-code/ with a big list of all the build commands and targets - a bit like the table in point 6 of http://dev.ardupilot.com/wiki/building-px4-with-make/ . What do you think?

Cheers

Hamish

[Andy Piper]

It looks fantastic. The price is pretty compelling as well. Too bad I already bought my AUAV-X2!

[Lorenz Meier]

Hi Hamish,

We need to reduce the amount of duplicate documentation and bloat for Dronecode. I've started to factor out the SW content for PX4 from http://pixhawk.org, so you're most welcome to extend this:

https://pixhawk.org/modules/pixracer

The flight stack wikis should focus on providing usage instructions and not repeat the existing hardware documentation (e.g. connectors and alike). The final board will go by the name of "Pixracer".

-Lorenz

[Hamish Willee]

Hi Lorenz

Thanks for the link. We will certainly link here when we do the docs.

I can't say that we won't do some duplication. The pixhawk site provides a generic overview of the hardware that is, as you would expect, independent of a particular flight stack or vehicle type. ArduPilot wiki builds on this for specific vehicles (e.g. Copter, Rover, Plane). That necessarily requires some duplication, but also removes a lot of the guess-work for users on setup for the particular vehicle. In addition, I really don't want to force users to jump around too much off site for basic next steps. We can of course discuss this sort of strategy, but I won't change it without broad buy-in from the community.

Randy, still need to know if from the software stack side it is worth documenting this product yet?

Cheers

H

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "drones-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/drones-discuss/IUlLAKVZBr0/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to drones-discus...@googlegroups.com.