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Dear Dronecode Members,
This month there has been a lot work preparing for the next release of PX4, including numerous minor improvements to all vehicle types and polishing support for the STM32F7 CPU family (FMUv5 / Pixhawk 4 supporting a Cortex M7).
Below we provide updates on the working groups, testing, and contributions. We’re also looking for feedback about some new features.
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We Are Hiring
Dronecode are looking for a senior embedded software engineer to be based in Zurich, Switzerland. The engineer will implement key software architecture components, work with our community to review their contributions, and help keep our documentation up to date.
For more information see the job description here.
1. Working group updates
Documentation Working Group
The Docs WG is tasked to improve the Dronecode and project sites and to extend and maintain developer and user documentation. Over the last month we’ve made a number of improvements, including migrating the PX4 User Guide to Gitbook and enabling our documentation for translation. We’re also progressing well with refreshing the Dronecode website.
UX Working Group
We held our first meeting on 11th April, 2017. The meeting ratified the group Charter and agreed our first goal, to create a clear set of user profiles for Dronecode users and members.
We’re still hoping to grow participation in this workgroup – for more information see the UX wiki page.
Messaging Working Group
The Messaging WG have been evaluating middleware solutions for communication between GCS, drone, cloud, and between processes running on the vehicle. eProsima have further progressed the selected solution:
- Demoed using CDR to pass uORB topic info from Pixracer to RPi and make the topic info available via Fast RTPS
- Created Yocto recipe for building FastRTPS
- Built and ran FastRTPS on Snapdragon Flight
- Set goal of supporting PX4 Optical Flow demo using FastRTPS
Safety Working Group
We are currently seeking a Dronecode system-based FAA waiver for operations beyond those permitted under the regular Part 107 rules. This application can then be the foundation of a process for certifying Dronecode-based UAVs.
Code Quality WG
The Code Quality WG is focused on ways to provide incremental improvements to Dronecode project code quality and testing. Members have been discussing the scope and resources available.
Camera working group
We’ve merged general MAVLink camera and gimbal API improvements and also Optical Flow support for Bebop.
Qualcomm have provided links to their platform independent Camera APIs for consideration and comment from TSC and Camera WG.
We’d also like review of the new Camera Streaming Daemon – please join the discussion here.
2. Contributions
This month we’ve merged 114 PRs (+31) and closed 227 issues (+168). More than 18000 lines were changed (additions and deletions).
3. Flight Testing
The test stats for this month (Mar 11 – Apr 10) are:
4. New features
Last month we mentioned the new Collision Avoidance Library. We’re still interested in your reviews and discussion here.
That’s it for this month’s update. Next month we’re looking forward to more information about the Dronecode platform roadmap along with more updates to the documentation and a PX4 release.
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