Blogs

We'd love the diydrones community to jump aboard our testing effort for the new ArduPilot sensor system. See  http://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/calling-all-testers-new-ardupilot-sensor-drivers/12741 for details

We have just implemented a major upgrade to the ArduPilot sensor drivers for STM32 based boards (PX4v1, Pixhawk, Pixhawk2, PH2Slim, PixRacer and PixhawkMini).The new sensor drivers are a major departure from the previous drivers which used the PX4/Firmware drivers. The new drivers are all "in-tree" drivers, bringing a common driver layer for all our supported boards, so we now use the same drivers on all the Linux boards as we do on the PX4 variants.We would really appreciate some testing on as many different types of boards as possible. The new driver system has an auto-detection system to detect the board type and while we think it is all correct some validation against a wide variety of boards would be appreciated.

Advantages of the new system

The new device driver system has a number of major advantages over the old one
* common drivers with our Linux based boards
* significantly lower overhead (faster drivers) resulting in less CPU usage
* significantly less memory usage, leaving more room for other options
* significantly less flash usage, leaving more room for code growth
* remote access to raw SPI and I2C devices via MAVLink2 (useful for development)
* much simpler driver structure, making contributions easier (typical drivers are well under half the lines of code of the PX4 equivalent)
* support for much higher sampling rates for IMUs that support it (ICM-20608 and MPU-9250), leading to better vibration handling

.....