PX4 Maintainers Call: February 28, 2023

📞 Coordination Calls PX4 Autopilot Coordination
1

:calendar: February 28, 2023

The maintainers meeting is a meeting for the developer team to coordinate on pressing issues and to plan the development of the PX4 Autopilot project, the community is welcome to join and listen, but won’t be able to speak unless specific access is granted ahead of time.

:selfie: Meeting Link

:notebook_with_decorative_cover: Agenda

  • Announcements
  • Confirm the PX4 sub systems categorization
  • Hardware tier support
  • Development from last week

:loudspeaker: Announcements

2022 Dronecode Report

PX4 Sub Categorization finalization

  • Purpose of having core components is to identify key features that someone can stand behind & support in the long term
  • If no one is actively testing it, we shouldn’t call it is ‘supported’
  • E.g. when multicopter survey mission feature doesn’t work, who should help out?

We can have 3 Tier system (Like GStreamer, they separate out different distributions: Ugly, etc):

  • Tier 1: Core feature that every company/user would be using/maintaining
  • Tier 2: Features people may try / sometimes try
  • Tier 3 (Ugly): Everything else (e.g. obsolete drivers, boards that only someone once contributed, etc)

Does this sub-component list actually capture what we want to support in the feature / take PX4 in the future?

  • Multi support levels / maintainement classification
  • It will involve a lot of effort in certain areas

Maintainer recruitment process

  • We can have it simple: “If you want to become a maintainer, contact any maintainer (or related)”. This will be documented in the PR.

We need to clarify the ‘requirement’ to have certain feature satisfy to be part of the core features.

Action Items

  • To all: Find the processes available online, of accepting core features (which conditions apply). E.g. other examples (requirement, testing, traceability)
  • Junwoo: Add the recruitment process all in the Documentation PR
  • Junwoo: update maintainer list
  • Ask people for what they are actually using/care about?

Hardware tier support

Let’s discuss the current hardware support and the path going forward

@rroche is proposing a 3-tier system

Tier 1
Top supported hardware, with constant support by both PX4 maintainers and hardware manufacturer/vendor

  • constantly tested by the hardware manufacturer
    • provides monthly quota of flight logs
    • before a stable release provides flight logs with nominal conditions
  • documentation includes setting up, wiring, and specs
  • everything in tier 2

Tier 2

  • hardware is available and can be purchased globally
  • has a landing page on our docs with tech specs and where to purchase
  • everything in tier 3

Tier 3

  • board target builds in PX4
  • can be flashed with all of PX4 Core modules

Tier 4

  • board target builds in PX4
  • Doesn’t support all of PX4 Core modules, can be either because of flash size or some other limitations

:memo: Meeting Notes

Future of Maintainers Call

Detailed discussions can happen in separate calls (e.g. Fixed Wing call, VTOL call, etc).

We can keep this maintainers meeting more about the overall PX4 structure discussion & how to improve the community, and not talk about PR/Issues.

Idea: Have e.g. Multicopter call (and advertise it well, to increase publicity) and have specific discussions there.

Increasing visibility of PX4 Meetings

Currently ‘dronecode calender’ isn’t well publicized.

Action Item: Expose it in Dronecode website.

Maintainer nomination

Jay: @Benja has been fixing a lot of ROS2 issues. We can have him as a maintainer.

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