Mav Link Help

[pilotnbr1]

I just ordered an M4 and am going through all the software setup so I will be ready to go once the M4 arrives.

I know this is a new product and I have some notes/info that may be useful to future users and the devs. I am setting everything up on a Laptop running Ubuntu 14.04.

-The git cloning option for GQC does not work for me because that is a 64 bit version of GQC. It took some time to find the 32 bit version of GQC.

-The next hurdle was QGC dependency on the latest version of QT (5.4 as of this writing). For some reason the latest versions of Ubuntu 14.04 build with QT 5.2. MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS GETTING THAT SORTED! Not helping things were the fact that the QGC instructions were to add a PPA that no longer exists for 5.4. I ended up finding another PPA which was the key to having QT 5.4 build itself.THIS ALL HAS TO BE DONE BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO BUILD QGC- as per the instructions.

Now I am looking at installing Mavlink.... I am not a big Linux command line/terminal guy-- Anyone have some verbose command line instructions to add Mavlink to my existing 32 bit QGC build?

Thanks!

[Max]

Hello #1, welcome to the forums.

Which QGC are you checking out? There's no separate 32 vs 64 bit versions... that depends on which OS, compiler, and Qt versions you use.

The readme clearly states Ubuntu 14.10 or higher is required for Qt5 compatibility. It should build with Qt4.8.6 as well, as stated in the readme. That said, it's not a trivial build in any case, and I do know the current Linux build documentation doesn't work for everyone as-is (I just don't have time to test it all and Linux is not my hobby anyway ).

You don't need to install Mavlink, the necessary headers are already in the QGC repo.

HTH,
-Max

[pilotnbr1]

That is very strange regarding 32 bit and 64 bit QGC builds. On http://qgroundcontrol.org/downloads there is even a brief discussion that Google earth is only supported on windows 32 bit builds. I also see "x32" and "x64" beside the download links. On your page http://autoquad.org/software-downloads/?category=2 I only see links for windows, Mac, and android and nothing regarding 32 or 64 bit. Am I missing a Linux QGC download link somewhere?

My first attempt at all this was to download from http://qgroundcontrol.org/downloads because that is where I saw the only Linux download link (with the x64 so I had doubts). When I tried to run it, it silently failed. Ultimately I discovered I was 32 bit and needed 32 bit QGC which I built via terminal and attempted to compile. My first attempt at qmake resulted in errors due to qt not being 5.4 - I obviously missed the note about Ubuntu 14.1 .

So it sounds like if you can point me to your custom build of QGC for Linux and confirm it is in fact 32 bit, I should uninstall my QGC build, upgrade my box to Ubuntu 14.1 and attempt a reinstall. That way I would have mavlink integrated. Thanks for the help!

[pilotnbr1]

I should also point out that currently QGC is running for me I also manually installed mavlink but am not sure it is actually integrated into QGC. QGC seems to see mavlink but I can't test my work until the m4 arrives...

Fyi the android ground control was multi step.. First I just went to google play and could not find it. Then I downloaded the zip from the website to my galaxy s4 but still needed an unzip app. Then I decided to just download the zip on my laptop and unzip, then send the apk file via email to myself to be opened on my phone and installed. However the file size of the apk is too big to be sent by gmail... So back to plan a and find an unzip app - which I did and successfully installed. Nice app btw!

I am not a complainer I swear! I do appreciate the help and hope to contribute to these projects at some point as I dabble in code writing. Thanks again'

[Max]

Source for QGC AQ version is at https://github.com/AutoQuad/qgroundcontrol_aq We split this from the original QGC a few years ago, and there are a lot of differences.

The original QGC will only work with AQ in a very limited capacity. You really need the AQ version.

It's true that GE plugin only works on Windows and Mac 32 bit versions. But it's not required to operate QGC (2D mapping works on all platforms). And it just doesn't work on any Linux version at all.

I've never gotten a distributable Linux version to work reliably, and besides it would be (more of) a full-time job to support all the different flavors and versions. With Linux you get what you pay for. As with gmail.

Mavlink is built into/included with QGC (both AQ and original versions) so there's no separate install required. You just need to connect to a mavlink-capable UAV. The included simulation link should also run successfully (at least it does in AQ version).

-Max

[pilotnbr1]

]So I upgraded to 14.1 and got rid of my existing QGC and Mavlink installs. I cloned QGC and attempted to build- I had some problems with Festival which I won't go into so I started from scratch without festival and text-to-speech. The build progressed until my first two warnings.

The first two warnings appear to be errors in includes looking for scrollbar.h and scrollzoomer.h . I changed the includes line to reflect the existing Scrollbar.h and ScrollZoomer.h .

The build in QT progressed until-
/home/pilotnbr1/GroundControl/qgroundcontrol_aq/src/ui/aq_LogViewer.cc:268: error: cannot call constructor 'QIcon::QIcon' directly [-fpermissive]
item->setIcon(QIcon::QIcon(pix));

I haven't tried to solve this yet so I thought I would quickly try to qmake in terminal and see if that shed some light on these problems. Running qmake in terminal generated this warning-
pilotnbr1@laptop:~/GroundControl/qgroundcontrol_aq$ qmake
Project MESSAGE: Qt version 5.3.0
Project MESSAGE: Linux build
Project MESSAGE: Release build
Project MESSAGE: 32-bit build
Project MESSAGE: Adding support for additional MAVLink messages for: autoquad
Project MESSAGE: Skipping Text-to-Speech support.
Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: multimedia

qmakeerror.png (41.65 KiB) Viewed 13837 times

Thanks for the help! ^

[pilotnbr1]

I should also point out that I apparently I have two versions of QT built now..... :/ QT 5.3.0 which terminal sees and 5.4.1 which I built and have been using to try and build QGC....

[Max]

[pilotnbr1]

That did it Max! I had a couple messages regarding missing stylesheets but QGC is up and running. Thanks for all the help!

[Max]

Glad to hear it, good job!

Sorry forgot to mention this earlier, but you probably want to build a Release version, unless you're actually going to debug it of course. As for the missing style sheets (and maybe other files), there is an qgc_install.pri script with a section for each OS type -- it is supposed to copy things like the style sheets to the build-blah-blah/bin folder. You could see if there's an error in there, and/or just manually copy the files from QGC repo folders. You need stuff from /files and from /aq folders (check the qgc_install script for details, Linux part starts ~ line 151).

-Max