Okay, so I’d like to leave an update before I head into the weekend. More detailed notes have been added to the drive regarding cuVSLAM in general, integration with PX4, and hardware integration. Also it’s a bit of mess I’ll clean it up at some point 
I’ve transitioning from a 45* mount to a 90* mount which mounts our Stereo Camera forward (shares a transform frame with the drone). It works with some marginal success. I’m still able to get lot’s of feature points on take off and in the air, I’m also able to get position locks.
As mentioned somewhere in my bringup notes, I was able to run non-flying movement tests with the camera and my ROS topic (/slam/odometry) had just a couple centimeters of odometry drift and a couple degrees rotational drift, which IMO is pretty good and supports the results provided in the cuVSLAM paper. I’m also able to execute a simple external mode which takes off, hovers for 10 seconds and lands. I was able to recreate this multiple times, where both takeoff and arming failed due to inconsistent/unstable position information that I would get with the 45* mount.
So defintely big strides of progress, but the issue I currently face is “toilet bowling”, which has been documented before. So essentially oscillations in the XY-plane (a video + logs are now in the drive if it’s hard to mentally visualize). I’ve experimented with changing EKF2_EV_DELAY to aptly reflect our gap in feature frames and IMU, but it had minimal effect. This is a drone meant for indoors behavior and I’ve got no compass enabled, which is lilkely the problem, but that’s a problem for Monday. So improvement, but still struggles. Hopefully I’ll have a better update next week!