Poking around, got questions...

Posted by Kelly Schrock on June 19, 2015 at 10:16pm

Hi,

So, I scp'ed the contents of the Solo's and controller's file systems to a local machine here so I could poke around. Lots of cool stuff in /usr/bin. I don't have any warranty-voiding plans, I'm mainly interested in learning how things work at this point. I'm guessing this is probably the wrong forum to ask "dev-ish" questions, and nothing popped out at me looking through the list of groups to join. If someone here could point me in a direction, I'd appreciate it. 

Thanks,

Kelly

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Replies

  • Ray Brothers June 20, 2015 at 7:36am
    Not sure exactly what you are looking for. I'm fairly new to all the 3DR open source resources. I found a starting point perhaps.
    http://3drobotics.com/open-source/
    • Kelly Schrock > Ray Brothers June 20, 2015 at 9:00am

      @Ray well, yeah, I've been around the open-source part of APM for a while. Worked briefly on a couple of small things. 

      One of the first things I'd like to do is provide a way to get logs off of the Solo more quickly. I hooked APM Planner up to it the other evening, selected all of its logs in the UI, and clicked "Download Log(s)". I saw a progress bar moving and thought "That's great, looks like log extraction is a lot faster than it used to be." 5 minutes later it reached 100%... and then started on the next of 36 logs. D'oh!

      So as a learning exercise, I'd like to try something that might be faster. During that process, I'm likely to have a question or two. What I was asking is, is this the right group for those kinds of questions? I know there are people on this group who would be able to answer them, I guess I'll ask here and if they direct me somewhere else, great.

    • Developer
      Randy > Kelly Schrock June 20, 2015 at 11:05pm

      Kelly,

      Cool that you're poking around on the Solo.

      There's a guy called "Sid" who is working in 3DR and has a patch ready that swaps out the whole SD card based dataflash with a mavlink message from the Pixhawk2 to the IMX6.  That means the logs will be saved directly to the iMX6 and the hop from Pixhawk2->IMX6->desktop used to download clogs will be shortened to just IMX6->Desktop.  That apparently makes it much faster.

      There are murmurs that the SoloLink will be open sourced but it's 100% confirmed nor is a timeline clear yet.

    • Kelly Schrock > Randy June 21, 2015 at 11:42am

      I had to find out what the IMX6 was. Seems like I need to play around with things while the Solo is on and I can log into it, to see what's mounted, etc. From what I understand, logs are saved to the controller, so I guess that's where I would look first.

    • Developer
      Randy > Kelly Schrock June 22, 2015 at 7:38pm

      Kelly,

      So there will be some logs on the pixhawk and I guess the solo controller and the solo-companion computer (which are both IMX6 boards) make their own logs as well.  I'm not sure where those other logs are.

      Are you thinking about maybe writing you own "shots"?  So for example the Solo has "orbit" and "cable cam".  It should be possible to write your own shots and somehow trigger them from the solo-controller.

    • Kelly Schrock > Randy June 22, 2015 at 7:57pm

      Hi Randy,

      After looking at it, I was thinking that's what I'll do. I set up SITL so I can thoroughly test what I work on before I actually try it on the Solo. (I'm sure a support call that started with "my Solo crashed" and involved me mentioning "So, I wrote a script, see, and was running it..." would be kind of awkward!) I also poked around in the Solo .apk to see if there's a way to add a shot type to the menu instead of triggering a custom script from one of the existing items. In general, I'm still in the process of figuring out how everything fits together, but it's looking promising!

      Thanks,

      Kelly

    • Ray Brothers > Kelly Schrock June 22, 2015 at 8:47pm
      Kelly,
      Sounds like you're pretty far into it. I should be getting my Solo on Thursday and look forward to looking things over. Keep us posted. Thanks for the info.
      Ray
    • Kelly Schrock > Ray Brothers June 22, 2015 at 9:12pm

      Looking a bit further, it looks like it would be fairly straightforward to add a new option to the Solo app's shot menu, and trigger it on the machine. But that's "straightforward" assuming you have decent code to begin with. The code I'm looking at is de-compiled from the APK, and the decompiler has a way of generating some pretty crappy Java code. In my experience, it alters the way the code behaves about 20% of the time, plus is replaces all of the R.* constants with raw numbers. All of which means I would probably end up with a pretty shaky "Hacked Solo" app. I might just write a new one that communicates with the machines in the same way, would probably be easier. Or, as @Randy said, just trigger it from a button on the controller.

      Too bad 3DR didn't release this in, say, November. This would be a great winter project! 

    • Kelly Schrock > Randy June 21, 2015 at 8:40am

      I hope it is. I was playing with DroneKit last night, and it's pretty cool!

    • Ray Brothers > Kelly Schrock June 20, 2015 at 2:02pm
      Well, there may be someone here that can help. Have you checked out the 3drpilots.com forum? There may be someone there. I will hopefully get my Solo next week and will begin to start getting into this.
      Ray
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