[Paparazzi-devel] happy new year 2017

[Gautier Hattenberger]

Hello everyone,

First, I wish you a happy new year 2017, may all your flights (and other 
stuff) be successful!

We usually release of a stable version around Christmas, but since the 
previous version came a bit late, the next one is not ready.

But we do have a few new changes already in the master branch. Here is a 
list of the key features:

- in the flight plans, the 'call_once' instruction is now mandatory for 
function that should not be called repetitively (like navigation 
routines) but only once (like init function): this change is "backward 
safe" has you won't be able compile a flight plan if your not up to date 
(https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi/pull/1967)

- it is possible to use an autopilot generated from a description file 
in xml rather than the static set of modes 
(http://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi/pull/1975). It is only working 
based an the rotorcraft firmware so far and it needs some special flags 
to to enable this option (by default, nothing should change for you). It 
is currently still under development, so be careful when trying this.

- the telemetry subsystems have been converted to modules, and I hope we 
can convert more before the next release. Any help for this will be 
greatly appreciated!

- a new guidance algorithm (guidance vector field) can be tested 
(http://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi/pull/1919)

- several improvements for boards (PX4), drivers, actuators (SBUS 
output) or computer vision tools.

- see the CHANGELOG for more details: 
https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

I wish we can have some more improvements in the coming months, 
especially in the build system and module handling, so we can have a 
nice v5.12 release.

Stay tuned!


Gautier for the Paparazzi Development Team


PS: congratulation to Piotr for his successfully kickstarter 
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/esden/1bitsy-and-black-magic-probe-demystifying-arm-prog