Lua mission scripting and Pixhawk

[Todd Stellanova]

I just noticed that the product page for the 3DR Pixhawk mentions:

"The benefits of the Pixhawk system include...completely new autopilot functions such as Lua scripting of missions and flight behavior..."

I realize this may be hyperbolic marketing-speak, but can anyone explain what this is referring to?  

I did a quick hack to port Lua to NuttX a few months back, but I hope that's not what 3DR is promoting.  I find no reference to Lua anywhere in the public AC firmware repos, so I assume this is a new capability of the ground control software rather than being a feature provided by  3DR's Pixhawk firmware. 

Thanks for any clarification!

[Bill Bonney]

Kevin Hester has ported lua and created extensions for APM. You can find more info of the discussion on this list. 

Bill

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[Todd Stellanova]

Thanks for the follow-up Bill.

Kevin, last I saw on this topic was Aug 6th: "Current plans: change to lua and deploy initially on PX4 (do GCS later)."

Is this now available on github somewhere?

[Kevin Hester]

Hi Todd,

Yep it is on github, but it is currently on the 'slow' development schedule - the PX4 is tightish on RAM for doing 'big' things in the scripting layer so I thought I'd focus first on making the GCSes scriptable (currently in alpha on andropilot - within a monthish it should be a lib that can go into droidplanner).  The current status of the lua scripting:

* initial attempt was Squirrel based

* actor layer written to let little actors speak mavlink as the 'api' between scripting and the APM ( https://github.com/geeksville/flsq )

* APM code modified to drop in scripting ( https://github.com/geeksville/ardupilot-1/commits/droneworks - see instructions in the repo below)

* The port of lua to px4 (from scratch, but px4dev gave me a spiffy malloc and I pulled in a suitably licensed setjmp.S to support lua exceptions): https://github.com/geeksville/Firmware/tree/addlua/src/modules/lua

If your hot to work on on vehicle scripting, I'd love to chat with you'd be interested in working on this.