QGroundControl development strategy / Developers update

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Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2010 11:09:48 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: QGroundControl development strategy / Developers update
From: qgroundcontrol <pix...@switched.com>
To: QGroundControl <qground...@googlegroups.com>
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Hi all,

I've been discussing some things with internal and external developers
lately, and it's time to cover this in the mailing list to have
everybody on the same page.

I'll use bullet points for readability, please feel free to respond to
any of them

- There will be a dev branch established this week. The current flow
of incoming patches with sometimes subtle bugs (which often show up
only after I merged several trees) will require heavier testing. The
main branch will provide a stable reference for people to start off
with development or for compiling from source

- There is a standalone generator for MAVLink, please see
mavlinkgen.pro in the QGroundControl directory. Will help those that
screw up MAVLink and then can't compile QGroundControl any more

- We will remodel the MAVLink generation to make it more convenient
for individual projects to have their own special messages. Most
likely this will involve splitting the generated files into a generic
mavlink.h for the default messages and a mavlink-<projectname>.h for
the other contributions.

- There is a new 3D View available (Lionel Heng from CVG is working on
it), currently visualizing the PIXHAWK quad. I've copied parts of GLUT
to allow the usage of some low-level GLU routines (e.g. sphere
drawing) as conveniently as in GLUT. Adding the aerial map and fixed-
wing models should be a snap for anyone interested in outdoor-3D
visualization.

- The SLUGS team is working on improvements of the serial
implementation, this should reduce CPU load on all systems (the
QExtSerialPort lib unfortunately was never that good when it came to
performance/asynchronous implementation)

- Bryan Godbolt is working on radio calibration / RC Transmitter
feedback, that will also go into mainline soon.

- Current performance readings: 12-20% load on one core on a 2.4 GHz
machine in all views except the Linechart view. The Qwt library causes
severe performance issues, I'll have to dig into this. This
fortunately proofs that the application in general is now in a quite
good performance spot. The default view is now the 3D view, not any
more the engineer view.

- We're currently heavily testing the current main branch version,
once this has proven stable and fast it'll be the next release
candidate, just in time for the pxIMU release.

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Date: Sun, 24 Oct 2010 03:07:10 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: Re: QGroundControl development strategy / Developers update
From: qgroundcontrol <pix...@switched.com>
To: QGroundControl <qground...@googlegroups.com>
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DONE! The MAVLink folder structure is now completely redone.
QGroundControl and MAVLink now conveniently support other Autopilots
and support for SLUGS and UAlberta is build in. Please immediately
update your sources and check compatibility. We will keep this state
as latest main branch and move with new features into the dev branch.

To enable custom messages, please copy the config file as described on
this page.

http://qgroundcontrol.org/autopilots/

Except for the serial testing on Windows, all points on the list in
the first email are therefore done by now. I've also updated the
project roadmap.

http://qgroundcontrol.org/roadmap

Copyright 2010 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/qgroundcontrol