Any Progress on unify uploadertool and GCS uploader [LP-481]?
« on: January 16, 2019, 05:45:04 am »
Hi,
I have been using librepilot for over a year on a Revolution board for a project, and it is great. Good job for the maintainers!
As a linux user who isnt a fan of IDE, I tend to drive my workflow around a commandline-centric approach with vim and bash. That includes editing, compilation and flashing/uploading firmware from the command-line without GCS. As the command-line uploadertool was incomplete, it lacks the feature to upload firmware compared to the GCS GUI. Due to that blocker, so I had to launch GCS every time just to upload my custom firmware until I had enough. So I spent a weekend to hack the uploadertool by moving the GCS ophid and hidapi code to the uploadertool and it has worked for me since then.

I stumbled upon https://librepilot.atlassian.net/browse/LP-481, and realized it was the pending feature for quite some time. Also that ticket seems to be much comprehensive in the scope and much more "proper" than the hacks I did just to make it work.

Is anyone still working on that? or is it still a desired feature? Would anyone have the need to upload firmware regularly on command line? I would love to get that feature merged into the mainline.
« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 05:49:54 am by jasonnfls »

Re: Any Progress on unify uploadertool and GCS uploader [LP-481]?
« Reply #1 on: January 16, 2019, 05:53:31 pm »
It looks like the author (Philippe Renon = filnet) last logged on to the forum many months ago and at that time he had recently finished the initial version of the nice "video in a GCS window (in next version)" project.  It looks like he has taken some time off.

Since I am mainly a firmware developer, I also use a non-IDE development environment, bash and a standard text editor.  The last time I used more was when making changes to GCS.

I suspect that this is not a high priority since the main reason anyone needs the command line version is for hardware not supported by the GCS, and that is basically just the OpenPilot Platinum GPS.  Also to consolidate the apparently duplicate code.

I recall that the command line firmware flash tool (OPUploadTool) would not build/run correctly in Windows (I don't know if this is fixed), but you are using Linux.  I wasn't aware of a problem with the Linux version, but I haven't used it in a couple years.  Is there a problem with the Linux version of OPUploadTool?
« Last Edit: January 16, 2019, 06:00:47 pm by TheOtherCliff »

Re: Any Progress on unify uploadertool and GCS uploader [LP-481]?
« Reply #2 on: January 21, 2019, 04:06:27 am »
Thanks for your reply!

The problem of the uploadertool in its current state is actually stated in the LP-481:
  • "uploadertool to work over hid/usb (not possible currently)"
And to my understanding, it is not a linux-specific issue. As I discovered in the source code, USB-related code branches were commented out, hence it is only possible to upload firmware via serial.

I will keep following this ticket and if see if I can help complete the remaining work.