I watch posts on this forum go for days with no responses. Is there a forum or email list with more activity?
Especially looking for a developer email list or forum because I'm interested in improving APM but I have the occasional question, for example: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/how-can-i-add-a-parameter - I'm very interested in improving auto takeoffs and track following at the moment.
I have a pretty good working knowledge of aviation and I want to put it to use making APM work better, but I feel like I'm alone in this endeavor when I ask make posts asking questions about it and they go unanswered for multiple days.
Replies
Yes, there are several invitation-only developer lists that are very active (20-30 posts a day each). There are too many posts in the open forums for the developers to keep up with, so a few sysadmins such as myself are tasked with trying to filter most of that back to the dev team. But the traffic on this site (hundreds of comments a day) is so high that none of us can keep up with everything, despite many hours a day of trying, so we count on the community to answer those questions themselves.
We do have Issue Trackers for ArduPlane and ArduCopter which is a good place for anyone to post bug reports and feature requests.
If you are a programmer and have a pretty good understanding of the code and how you might contribute, we can add you to the dev lists so you can see how the dev process works. Just PM me with an email address linked to a Google account.
BTW, parameters are typically added in negotiation with the MAVLink team and require GCS software support and coordination with all the vehicle platform team leads. There are scores of developers affected by that, so it's done through a relatively careful consultative process. If you have a suggestion, it should probably go through one of the team leads to be considered by the group.