This is my little working folder with some mods for my work with Pixhawk. I don't always guarantee that the other APM2 etc VRBrain, etc will work since those platforms are not of interest to me. I do plan to try and make sure I don't break anything that the Pixhawk drives like ArduPlane or ArduRover.
I like to group my git clones by the root, so diydrones, tridge, mavlink etc would be the top level folder. So here, since we're using my fork, it's in nwind21.
git clone git://github.com/nwind21/ardupilot.git C:\<your git working root>\nwind21\ardupilot
git clone git://github.com/nwind21/PX4Firmware.git C:\<your git working root>\nwind21\PX4Firmware
git clone git://github.com/nwind21/PX4NuttX.git C:\<your git working root>\nwind21\PX4NuttX
git clone git://github.com/mavlink/mavlink.git C:\<your git working root>\mavlink\mavlink
Switch to the Arducopter-3.2 branch for all repositories.
ardupilot has a standardized Linux virtual machine (VM) setup script that uses the free VirtualBox virtualization software. You can use it to create a standard, reproducible development environment in just a few minutes in Linux, OS X, or Windows.
Download VirtualBox for your Mac, Windows or Linux machine.
Enable Virtualization in BIOS This Vagrantfile will instruct Vbox provisioner to enable multi-core of 4 with a CPU cap of 80%. If you do not, the SITL will be extremely slow. If you don't enable Virtualization options, the box will fail to boot.
Edit the Vagrantfile shared_folders to map to the three required projects: ardupilot, PX4Nuttx, PX4Firmware, and jsbsim.
Optionally, edit your location for your Ubuntu archives From the list here [Ubunut Mirrors(https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archivemirrors) search and replace the values in ~ardupilot/puppet/modules/preconditionals/files/sources.list to where you want. By default, it points to Easynews.com since they have a large download pipe. This can help speed up provisioning since apt-get will use an archive mirror closer or with a bigger pipe than the default ubuntu mirror.
Start the Vagrant In the ardupilot directory, run vagrant up from the command line as an Adminstrator. This will create a new Ubuntu Linux VM. This box is provisioned via puppet. Any updates to the provisioning can be applied by running vagrant provision. The puppet files mimic the setup in "ardupilot/Tools/scripts/install-prereqs-ubuntu.sh -y"` as well as the requirements for SITL. You do NOT need to run the script. Puppet handles the provisioning.
Wait for Puppet to complete provisioning Once the provisioning is complete (it takes a while (30min or so) due to the large UI install packages)
Reboot to get a nice UI] run vagrant reload and upon reboot, the UI will appear. I recommend logging in using GNOME 2d (no effects) and installing the
GuestBoxAdditions from the Guest machine.
Login Login password is "vagrant" as well as sudo password.
Fixing the guest additions defect in VBox 4.3.10 VirtualBox 4.3.10 has a a defect in the VBoxAdditions. You will need to run the script "sudo vbox_patch.sh" located in
home directory then reload the machine with vagrant reload otherwise vagrant will fail to mount the shared folders AFTER you've installed the VBoxAdditions.
Once you've followed the instructions above, here's how you would build ArduCopter for PX4 in the development environment:
# cd ardupilot/ArduCopter
# make configure
Back at the terminal:
# make px4
I personally like to run the Software In Test Loop to make sure your build and test environment is sane...
If I did everything properly in the VM, you should be able to do:
# cd ardupilot/Tools/autotest
# autotest_n21.py --mode quadcopter
And that should build the quadcopter SITL and run the simulation. If you're making a code change and just wanna re-build incrementally:
# autotest_n21.py --mode build-quadcopter --incremental
or just re-fly
# autotest_n21.py --mode fly-quadcopter