The lofty idea that will likely be the death of me: rewriting Mission Planner in Avalonia.
Welcome to the Avalon Planner repository, a place of high ambitions, grand plans, and currently, no substance. Keep your expectations as low.
In theory, Avalon Planner is a cutting-edge, groundbreaking Ground Control Station (GCS) software designed for drone enthusiasts, and professionals.
Current Project Phase: Wishful Thinking
Functionality: Non-Existent
Coffee Consumed: Enough to fuel a small spaceship
Probability of Success: Well, I'm an optimist
Good question! Here's why:
- Learning: They say the best way to learn is to throw yourself into the deep end. I'm pretty sure I'm building the ocean here.
- Challenge: Because who needs a calm and peaceful life when you can drown in code?
- Fun: My definition of fun might be different from yours.
This is something I ask myself a lot, but for some reason, I have convinced myself that yet another option is a good idea:
- Mission Planner is great. It's feature-complete (or damn-near), and highly customizable. However, it is showing its age, and the new-user experience is bad (or so I am frequently told by new users).
- QGC is also great. It's extremely simple, and has a great touch interface. It's also compatible with both PX4 and ArduPilot. It very well might be a better path for me. I am intending to familiarize myself with it; maybe to steal some concepts from it, maybe to just shift over to expanding QGC to fit my vision.
- MAVProxy... doesn't count.
- ArduConfigurator is a REALLY cool idea for improving new user experience. I don't like the idea of using a browser-only program as a full-blown GCS. Maybe I'm just being a snob though.
- Asv.Drones is an awesome new player in town, and is how I learned about Avalonia in the first place. It's rough, but has great promise. However, it seems to be a company project, with private project planning and no community I can jump into.
I'm not. I will continue to contribute to Mission Planner, probably more than I will actually work on this project. However, the more I work Mission Planner, the more I find myself saying "hrmm, this whole class needs a rewrite from scratch" (I'm looking at you, HUD.cs). This project is just me taking that to the extreme.
- Cross-Platform Support: So everyone can equally not use it on any device.
- Full Localization: It will speak every language, but nonsense is universal.
- Plugin Management: So people can find some broken plugin on a broken plugin manager for their broken program.
- Rich developer documentation: [TODO: add quip here]
Looking to contribute? Are you sure? Send me an email, DM me on Discord, or open an issue ticket here just telling me you want to help. Happy to take anything I can get.
This project is a labor of love, frustration, and a bit of insanity. If you find any bugs (and you will, if I ever get to the point of executable code), feel free to let me know.