QGroundControl v1.0.0 ready for alpha-testing

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Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2011 03:51:02 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: QGroundControl v1.0.0 ready for alpha-testing
From: QGroundControl Maintainer <l...@student.ethz.ch>
To: QGroundControl <qground...@googlegroups.com>
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Hi all,

It's been quiet here, but the work on the next release was intense in
the meanwhile. The v10release branch in the GIT repository contains
the QGroundControl v1.0.0 release candidate.

It has a few new features, but it is mostly a cleanup of the GUI and
includes a lot of fixes for performance, it should consume much less
CPU now.

Substantial work was invested to make the application smoother, more
stable and to remove all the minor hickups that were present in
previous versions.

Please note that this version requires MAVLink v1.0.0 on the
autopilot, which is downloadable via GIT from the MAVLink v10release
branch. MAVLink v1.0.0 is mostly API-compatible to the current
version, but the wire format has changed (so MAVLink 0.9 planes/GCS
can't talk to v1.0 ones, but porting your onboard C code is
straightforward, because most functions calls stayed the same). You
will also have to rename a few messages, a porting guide will be
shortly available. This one-time change allowed us to substantially
clean up the protocol, make it future-proof and much safer. MAVLink is
now capable of detecting if the message format is incorrect, e.g. if
you've changed a int32_t to float MAVLink will now reject the message,
previously it decoded same-sized fields.

The MAVLink code size has also reduced substantially and the runtime
speed and buffer use has been reduced as well (thanks to Andrew
Tridgell and Paul Grobler).

Only experienced developers should port at this point, but in 1-2
weeks its time for everybody to move on to the new version.

There is also a video of the current version (watch in particular the
custom parameter sliders, you can use them for your autopilot as
well!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaQ0bH0WW80

And binaries can for Mac OS and Windows be downloaded here:

https://github.com/mavlink/v10release/downloads

Copyright 2011 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/qgroundcontrol