PX4 Maintainers Call: May 16, 2023

rroche · May 9, 2023, 4:01pm

May 16, 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.

Meeting Link

Agenda

v1.14 Release candidate
Open Mic

Meeting Notes

v1.14 Release Candidate

Daniel: Coming across some issues from users.

V6C is locking up after fixed-wing landing - Ryan
- Safety issue
Calibration spewing errors
PWM default value issue: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/pull/21513. Related: PWM (ESC) calibration. In the long term we should re-think about how we do calibration, there’s a WIP branch.

Note: When talking with ppl separately, they raise issues.

Action Item: PRs are piling up. Let’s unblock main branch at the end of this week (resetting of 1.14 branch).

Potential regressions:

Sending RTK GPS corrections thru USB: When USB is re-connected, second instance of uORB gets published. Unless someone uses 2 RTCM Telemtry streams, likely not an issue. PR: [WIP] Ublox add UBX-RXM-RTCM for RTCM input status by AlexKlimaj · Pull Request #21595 · PX4/PX4-Autopilot · GitHub
Optical Flow (testing by Daniel in progress)
Lot of preflight failures: We may need to set more grace period. Alex will share log with Daniel.

NuttX update: NuttX with STM32 Backpors by davids5 · Pull Request #21495 · PX4/PX4-Autopilot · GitHub

Parachute plugin not working

github.com/PX4/PX4-SITL_gazebo-classic

Parachute deployment does not appear to work

opened 12:46AM - 22 Jul 21 UTC

hamishwillee

bug

The instructions in https://docs.px4.io/master/en/simulation/gazebo.html#simulat…ed-parachute-flight-termination explain that you can simulate parachute deployment by first launching the simulator with: ``` make px4_sitl gazebo_if750a ``` Then force flight termination. I tested this by forcing an altitude safety geofence violation (set a low altitude ceiling and flew straight up). The flight termination happens - there are GCS notifications and the vehicle crashes. But there is no indication that a parachute is deployed. How would you know? Shouldn't we see something appear on the screen?

Relevant discord thread: Discord

There’s a commander PR related to defining how the parachute trigger should even work: commander: collapse ArmStateMachine and simplify by dagar · Pull Request #21129 · PX4/PX4-Autopilot · GitHub

Action Item:

Review how the real world parachute trigger works (PWM, etc)
Review the SITL implementation

hamishwillee · May 18, 2023, 1:53am

FYI @rroche The docs Parachute | PX4 User Guide should accurately reflect the current hardware implementation of parachute on PX4. In summary, parachutes are automatically triggered by failsafe termination. This will set outputs to their failsafe values and you can configure those values in actuator outputs screen. You can also tell PX4 that it has a connected MAVLink parachute and it will also emit MAV_CMD_DO_PARACHUTE on failsafe.

There is also mechanism for a parachute to report its state, but this appears to mostly be “faked” - you basically get a good heathy mavlink parachute if you are getting appropriate heartbeat.