There aren’t many success stories or posts on the community forum about it yet; this post from back in April doesn’t give awfully many warm and fuzzies: Durandal First Flight (1.11.0 Beta)
Can someone elaborate on what components are working and which ones still require work when it comes to Durandal support in PX4? Perhaps comparing and contrasting existing firmware support with Pixhawk 4’s. Is Durandal officially part of the build certification FMU pool?
To give more background: some of us got burned when we bought Emlid’s Navio2 just to learn afterwards that the manufacturer “officially supports Ardupilot and Raspberry Pi OS”, but not PX4 and Ubuntu. They know and we know their real reasons for this. My last build of px4_raspberry_pi from master had most of the components in Navio2 not interfacing with PX4; this is echo’d in Emlid’s support forums. So I’m treading cautiously now.
Back to PX4 and Durandal, let me know if we have stable/reliable flying using Durandal and I’ll buy.
It’s fully supported and seems to build fine.
As for that post it probably has nothing to do with Durandal. There was no followup and it could have been tuning. Since really it is the same hardware with a faster processor and a nice case there should be no reason why not.
We rarely hear about it when things work fine
Thank you both for replying. I’ll give Durandal a try next time I’m putting in an order.
Haha so true @Barry_Bolton. I see the multi-day delays in their own support forum responses, including re: a Pi4 support issue that was still going on as of August 2020.
I choose to use Ubuntu over Raspberry Pi OS any day and they had told me outright they would not support Ubuntu, which to me is silly and a non-starter (you may come across a longer post I authored on their forum about this a while back). Last night I sat down and enabled the remaining /dev/spidev0.* overlays to make the Navio2 sensors work with PX4 on Ubuntu 20. PWM output is still broken so some work is still needed, but I can always fall back on taking their working C++ examples and tailoring them to the PX4 code landscape. I won’t spend too much of my time on this but if it all works out and if folks find it useful I may create a how-to or perhaps a working disk image for getting Navio2 to run with Ubuntu 20 and PX4.
Sounds good, let me know how your tests go.
To answer your question, I like PX4. But seriously the biggest issue for me with Ardupilot is their licensing mandate, I choose not to go down the path of potentially being forced to contribute every piece of functionality I will have written long after I’m “locked in” to Ardupilot. I suspect that’s actually one of the reasons why Emlid would prefer to steer towards a license like Ardupilot’s, because with the support level like you’ve commented they would benefit from making it compulsory for folks to donate features and fixes; less work for Emlid software support that way. I don’t have an issue with contributing code, changes and fixes - I mentioned the Ubuntu 20 & PX4 stuff above - I just don’t want to partake in how Emlid is going about it.
Sounds good @jimdgit thanks for confirming. I suspected that post was related to a rc version of PX4 and not an overall indicator of stability.
My main question. Which platform will provide the user with the most stable flying platform. The client and end user of the products we make does not care about licensing agreements. The want the most robust and reliable system. So which one is that?
The manufacturer supported thing just tells you that it is not compatible with Pixhawk standards, and hence any specific work to keep it in-sync with PX4 needs to be provided by Holybro. They have done that work for current releases and at this point they seem to be doing everything needed to keep it compatible.
But seriously the biggest issue for me with Ardupilot is their licensing mandate, I choose not to go down the path of potentially being forced to contribute every piece of functionality I will have written long after I’m “locked in” to Ardupilot. I suspect that’s actually one of the reasons why Emlid would prefer to steer towards a license like Ardupilot’s, because with the support level like you’ve commented they would benefit from making it compulsory for folks to donate features and fixes; less work for Emlid software support that way. I don’t have an issue with contributing code, changes and fixes - I mentioned the Ubuntu 20 & PX4 stuff above - I just don’t want to partake in how Emlid is going about it.