PX4 Maintainers Call: July 18, 2023

📞 Coordination Calls PX4 Autopilot Coordination
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:calendar: July 18, 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

  • v1.14 Release
  • CI improvements?

:memo: Meeting Notes

v1.14 Release

All the pending issue/PRs were resolved. Time for a RC?

Daniel is adding cubepilot and cubeorangeplust to Jenkins S3 upload script. Then, we can cut the RC.

There’s Remote ID related user doc PR, which can be merged afterwards: Remote ID in PX4 v1.14 by hamishwillee · Pull Request #2627 · PX4/PX4-user_guide · GitHub

QGC versioning: Except for this little report on 4.2.6 not connecting properly: Airspeed Calibration not working on Pixhawk 5X VTOL Firmware · Issue #19088 · PX4/PX4-Autopilot · GitHub

Documentation for the RC release notes:
TODO: Will create the User Docs PR to include changes since the beta2, and have developers collaborate on it.

CI improvements

It used to fail due to CMake version being too low for Micro XRCE DDS builds.

Metadata build container version can be updated, and should start passing: PX4-Autopilot/.github/workflows/deploy_all.yml at b405a1aa499addb0a6f46fb35b86663974b7c5d0 · PX4/PX4-Autopilot · GitHub

Currently NuttX targets and Linux Targets are separated (action wise).

E.g. Metadata run has way more targets that can fail (isn’t covered in Nuttx Builds): advertise esc_status where is publishes · PX4/PX4-Autopilot@b405a1a · GitHub

TODO: Combining the NuttX build & Metadata upload into a single script will speed things up. E.g. Since now we are building the target separately for each run, which 2x-es the run time.

Having a user adding a board target shouldn’t have to touch CI for the metadata/binary to get built.

TODO: The NuttX build is not getting triggered for branches except main. The stable, beta, and release/* will be added to include them for triggering the actions.

MAVLink submodule update

In Simulation the compatability is broken. So we need to update the submodule in Simulation, then in PX4.

Some documentation on reducing flash?

Having some hints on what can work to reduce flash can be helpful, like Blotty docs.

There’s nothing specific that works in general, so won’t be feasible to document so much.

Embedded Debug Tools is now public

Play around with it!

Working with orb trace, j-trace, etc.

Few cool use cases:

  1. If the PX4 is stuck, and shell isn’t responding, we can check which tasks are running, and check for core dump, check for GPIO and interrupt statuses. Documentation here: embedded-debug-tools/src/emdbg/debug/gdb.md at main · Auterion/embedded-debug-tools · GitHub
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Re embedded debug tools, is there anyone who has actually used this who can provide a page or section under Debugging Topics | PX4 User Guide

I can see it might be useful, but I don’t know enough about the state before/after to understand why this is useful compared to what we already have … and the cases where you wouldn’t care. I don’t know what hardware you need for it over and above what we already have.

EDIT. Note, the author is going to provide first shot at docs in our library. Hurray.