Rover
We discovered that in Rover we were not reporting on the LiDAR in the SYS_STATUS message. This would cause the GCSs to show the LiDAR as unhealthy or absent in some scenarios.
Plane
The MPU9250 initial driver support has been done and pushed into Master. Most likely nobody will have one of these chips in their autopilot yet HOWEVER the driver for this puts us onto the road for 4kHz sampling which has the potential to greatly reduces the problems relating to vibration.
Development to support version 2 of the PulsedLight LiDARLite (nicknamed bluelabel) is ongoing with a few issues that need to be ironed out. The first version of the driver has been pushed into Master. The expectation is that users will be purchasing these as apparently they resolve some of the I2C issues the first version suffered.
Training mode has been adjusted in Plane. The roll limits now scale with airspeed. In other words if you slow down too much it won’t allow you to turn hard.
PX4 Flight Core
More VTOL airframes are supported, now covering various tilt-rotor geometries, duo-rotor and quadrotor tailsitters, plane plus quad combinations and delta wing plus quad. Transitions have been smoothed further and work reliably. The project kicked off last week more coordination on video streaming and has kicked off this week more coordination on marker tracking. If this is of interest to other projects a group on the Dronecode level to discuss this further would make a lot of sense.
Mission Planner
Mission Planner has had a few screens created, for displaying EKF status, Vibration levels, as these are a major statistic for the autopilot health. Log files created with Mission Planner have also been updated to display both the EKF position as well as the GPS position, this allows a comparisons between the two. Work has also been completed on displaying nofly zones, as defined in a KML file, and user definable.
QGroundControl
The overall setup process has been improved considerably over the last months and we released this week a new tutorial video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91VGmdSlbo4
The video features the complete setup experience for PX4 (as visible in the video APM can be flashed as well) and also shows the new flight mode config which is similar to the concepts used by other projects discussed in the PX4 and APM development communities a few weeks ago.
