Leverage pending Ardupilot gimbal features to gimbal manager V2 mavlink sub-protocol

[Davidsastresas]

Following the conversation #23092, It seems there are some Ardupilot gimbal features that do not have any way to be triggered and monitored using gimbal manager v2 sub-protocol.

Adding them would allow for very nice GCS integrations like we already have for the rest of gimbal features. So far I think the only feature remaining would be:

• Track with gimbal another vehicle system ID.
• Track with gimbal home position.

If there is any other feature not supported please let me know and we can add it to the list. Whenever we all are happy with the pending features to work over, I will work on them in all fronts, Ardupilot, mavlink and QGC.

[manvendra5345]

Hi @Davidsastresas ,

I’m interested in working on this issue as part of GSoC. I’ve gone through the issue details and related code, and I’d love to take ownership and start contributing.

If it’s available, could you please assign this issue to me?

[peterbarker]

I’m interested in working on this issue as part of GSoC. I’ve gone through the issue details and related code, and I’d love to take ownership and start contributing.

You realise this is mostly a QGC and mavlink thing rather than an ArduPilot thing? The ArduPilot patches will be quite small, basically adding support for (e.g.) MAVLINK_MSG_ID_GIMBAL_MANAGER_SET_FOLLOW_SYSID (we already handle the same data as a command, this just puts it in a message). Half the fight will be over the mavlink standard - for example, how would such a message return failure (the command can return a variety of error codes)?

If it’s available, could you please assign this issue to me?

We don't typically assign issues. But feel free to work on it.

You will need a pretty extensive development environment for this; the ArduPilot Wiki contains a bunch of information on running SITL, but you'll also need a development env for QGC - and I don't know where that documentation is.

[Davidsastresas]

@manvendra5345 Very happy to see you interested on this. I second what @peterbarker says, most of the work will be in mavlink protocol and QGC.

I am quite fluent and responsive in QGC. My bottleneck is usually communication/synchronization between QGC/Mavlink front and Ardupilot front. So if you can help on that gap it would be tremendously helpful. I will be around to help of course, and I commit to being very responsive on the QGC changes whenever you need to test stuff.

I can also help you to get your QGC environment running, although if you don't plan to actually develop code in QGC you can just use the executables we generate. These docs should be up to date to build QGC 5 https://docs.qgroundcontrol.com/master/en/qgc-dev-guide/getting_started/index.html

Thanks!

[manvendra5345]

@Davidsastresas , @peterbarker Thank you for your response—I’d love to work on this. I just want to clarify one thing: does this need to be specifically for GSoC? If not, that’s completely fine, as my main goal is to learn how to contribute to open source.

I’m primarily asking to understand the contribution process better. Also, @Davidsastresas, please let me know if you could help me set up and run the QGC environment.

[Davidsastresas]

Sorry @manvendra5345 I forgot to answer you. About GSoC I am sorry I am not familiar with it so I can not comment.

About QGC build environment, please see https://docs.qgroundcontrol.com/master/en/qgc-dev-guide/getting_started/. I would attempt to set it up to build using Qt creator. If you find issues you can ask me and we can try to figure it out. See you!