Out-of-box experience with Dronecode

[biapalmeiro]

Hi all,

I’m glad to discuss. I’d like to understand better what he means by “out-of-box experience”. It looks going far from the documentation, probably it involves the QGC experience also.

Maybe we can start this conversation on the next UXWG meeting.

Regards
Bia
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Hi Lorenz

Docs funding is good for me to hear, but you probably should raise this in the next TSC meeting (Ramon indicated "probably not" based on current funds).

With respect to tools yes, a call would be great.

The jmavsim simulator builds and runs in a VM on windows but is very prone to flyaway then crash shortly after starting (I don't have a Linux machine) . Not sure if it is a PC resource issue or a bug in the simulation. Anyway, it is good enough to test build instructions but not really good enough to for end users to "play". What I'd love is to be able to reliably run this in a VM that gets set up via Vagrant or whatever.

Cheers
Hamish

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Hi Hamish,

Given the importance of docs I don’t think that the funding will be a gating factor - that simply has to come together. Overall we probably should arrange a call to sync on tools. From my experience both simulators always work except for in fringe use cases - if they don’t I would need to know that. We do have lockstep in the PX4 SITL but not in Gazebo or jMAVSim, so it might be time to smarten up those.

-Lorenz

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Hi Lorenz, Mark,

More than happy to discuss (Mark, when would be a good time to work through this?) - but honestly this is not "news". I understand the flaws in our docs - it just takes time to work through them (to put it into perspective it took me about 7 months full time to put ArduPilot into a good state) and in this role I am part time and spent a lot of that working on the websites and newsletters etc.

I am working through the simulation docs in the coming week(s) - kicked off a discussion on this last week. IMO is a bit of a weakness in our story that we see this as a "developer" tool - in ArduPilot the quick start idea revolves around getting people up and flying the simulator so they can play with the system even without having an actual vehicle. This is not really viable on PX4 because I can't get SITL and JMAVSIM to run "stable" in a VM on my windows machine. I understand that there are some sorts of timing issues that require the system be real-time responsive (no lock-step work going on?)

After Simulation is done, my plan is to move back to the User guide. I just submitted a fully revamped config section. After that I plan to revamp the flight modes docs, then the basic assembly and last of all concepts.

Ramon has indicated (but not confirmed) that there is unlikely to be further funding for general docs in late July when my contract finishes (there may be more for specific projects- (e.g. SDK docs). I don't think I'll get much further than the docs above in that time.
Regards
Hamish

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Hamish, Beatriz: Can you work with Mark to get a debrief? We clearly need to fix the docs - from an operation perspective we do have the very quick getting started experience for developers - we just need to make sure the documentation is accurate.
-Lorenz
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FYI, here is a very experienced embedded developer's opinion of coming to Dronecode/PX4. There is still work to be done to make getting started easier.

-Mark
Thanks!
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So far, the out-of-box experience with Dronecode isn't quite as nice as Ardupilot. The latter gave me a software simulation run, from scratch, in about fifteen minutes of point-and-click and console commands. In contrast, after more than a day I'm still grappling with OpenGL on my Mac for Dronecode, and that's after having to kind of hunt around for the general instructions in the first place.

I know that's not an apples-to-apples comparison, and it's definitely not a call to action or a request for help. Just thought you might like to know. Maybe I should write a "getting started" blog entry sometime...

I must say, I'm amazed by the level of professionalism shown by both communities. I've been stuck in mobile phones for so long, I had no idea that UAVs were moving ahead so quickly. I'm excited to show up for work again, and that feels nice.

Cheers!
b.g.