PX4 Dev Call: July 27, 2022

July 27, 2022

Join us

Agenda

  • Community Announcement
  • Community Q&A
  • Project Updates
  • General Discussions
  • Weekly Overview
  • High priority queue
  • Release

:loudspeaker: Community Announcement


PX4 Youtube Channel is booming :boom:

Check out the Control Allocation video!

:people_holding_hands: Community Q&A (No deep technical discussions)


:exclamation: Guideline for asking a Question

  1. Specify what you are trying to achieve
  2. Specify what environment / platform you are using
  3. Prepare a Link or Document to help understand if possible
  4. First, ask the question on the Slack or create a Github Issue!
  5. If you take over 5 minutes for the question, please continue in Slack or a Github Issue.

Q.1 : Circuit Breaker - Chris

Cons: Currently it’s tedious to enable the circuit breaker (need to set magic-number)
Pros: If we have a bit-flip or any bit errors, we don’t want to accidentally enable the circuit breaker.

Documentation on Circuit Breakers are not specific.
ā€œFlight terminationā€ behavior isn’t easy to predict with current documentation.

Flight Termination Circuit Breaker param is here.

Even if the geo fence violated ā€˜action’ is to Terminate, we don’t want to fight for this using this ā€˜circuit breaker’. User should rather be explicitly notified that vehicle WILL terminate, if the action setting is to ā€˜Terminate’.

Related PR : RFC Commander

Let’s kill a lot of the circuit breakers! :drop_of_blood:

Q.2 : GPS 1 and GPS 2 - Farhang

Putting second GPS to GPS 1, is it correct to do that? GPS signal is not coming in.

  • Check baud rate
  • Try out the gps commands (driver) in the console manually
  • Start with first port, do the gps info & try out the other port as well

Q.3 : How does external compass priority setting work (automatic?) - Junwoo

With a boat (which has an external mag & GPS), it was unclear what kind of setting I needed to apply for a magnetometer priorities.

It should be ok without touching the priorities (PX4 automatically sets external / internal mag’s priorities appropriately)

  • Can check each sensor_mag message to check if it’s configured to be internal / mag

It would be nice to have an UI that shows which hardware is connected to where, in which rotation, which priorities and what attributes are related in a single view.

  • CAN / MAVLink can add complexity
  • Sharing the Device Tree to the UI (e.g. QGC) would be an option as well.

Docker containers - Florian

Using the docker to flash (via USB connection) was tricky. Building the firmware image itself is not a problem.

Giving the privilege when running the container could give permission to detect all the bootloader connections, etc - should be enough to flash the device.

Maybe check the dmesg or lsusb output within the container to check if board is detected

:construction_worker_woman: Project Updates


P.1 : Racing boat project :speedboat:

Junwoo is currently integrating PX4 into a Racing boat and posting updates via blog series in the forum. Please feel free to check it out if you are interested!

PR (For reference, is used for testing purposes): [WIP] Rover controller refactor by junwoo091400 Ā· Pull Request #19957 Ā· PX4/PX4-Autopilot Ā· GitHub

  1. RC Speed Boat with PX4 - Episode 0 : Trying out the Boat and integrating Pixhawk
  2. RC Speed Boat with PX4 - Episode 1 : Using PX4 to control the boat!

P.2 : Helicopter support - Alex & Daniel :helicopter:

Currently bought a helicopter to try out the PX4 support :+1:

:thinking: General Discussions


D.1 : Cube Orange problems

There has been multiple reports of Cube orange having problems with PX4:

Let’s collect the problems here:

Cube Orange SD card logging dropouts are high - Alex

  • Using STM32H7 SDMMC1 causes problem in DMA, so need to use STM32H7 SDMMC2.
  1. Check sd bench command outputs to verify if there’s issue there first
  2. Maybe this might help?

Other

This is pretty cool :smirk:

:calendar: Weekly Overview


:mouse2: Github

Recently updated Issues / PRs in PX4-Autopilot Link

Pull Requests

Issues

:computer: Slack

:phone: Last Dev-Call

PX4 Dev Call: July 20, 2022

  • Slack bot to encourage people to use / visit Discuss Forum
    • Currently the Slack API doesn’t tell if a message is in a thread or not - Ramon

:exclamation: High priority queue


Discussion based on: https://github.com/orgs/PX4/projects/24

:ear_of_rice: Release