Change Altitude Mini-Widget

[ericjohnson97]

Adding the functionality to command altitude changes

closes #581

2024-02-19.21-32-08.mp4

[rafaellehmkuhl]

Cool!

Curiosity: when you send a goTo message with X and Y being 0, MAVLink ignores those and just change the altitude?

[ericjohnson97]

Cool!

Curiosity: when you send a goTo message with X and Y being 0, MAVLink ignores those and just change the altitude?

It must. I captured a change altitude command from QGC and copied it. Maybe I should test it with XY ignore bits set just incase the functionality ever changes.

[ericjohnson97]

Cool!
Curiosity: when you send a goTo message with X and Y being 0, MAVLink ignores those and just change the altitude?

It must. I captured a change altitude command from QGC and copied it. Maybe I should test it with XY ignore bits set just incase the functionality ever changes.

I tried with XY ignored and ardupilot did not respond for some reason. I don' have time tonight to fully investigate this, but given that QGC uses this exact format I think it should be safe.

[ericjohnson97]

@rafaellehmkuhl I see the needs documentation tag is set, does that content need to be updated here?
https://github.com/bluerobotics/ardusub-zola

what are the expectations?

[ES-Alexander]

what are the expectations?

We haven't yet written contributing guidelines there unfortunately (sorry!).

New contributions to Cockpit should (almost always) be documented with PRs to the Cockpit-devel-temp branch.

For this particular feature I'd recommend adding a bullet point for the new widget in the mini widgets section (of the advanced-usage docs) describing what it does / what it's for, and include some numbered bullets within that describing the process of using it (since it's not just a single button press), preferably with a screenshot showing the relevant UI elements (e.g. if you screenshot a display similar to 0:05 from your current video, you could add some numbers to the image showing which elements are interacted with at each part of the process).

As a few notes:

• For the numbering it's preferred to use repeated 1.s, because the markdown renderer should auto-number them from there, and it reduces changes if the steps get modified in future, e.g.

  1. Click the `Change Alt` mini-widget button
  1. Set the new altitude target on the vertical slider that appears on the right side of the screen
  1. Slide to confirm
  

• For screenshots that cover more than a single UI element, it can be nice if they're taken on a reasonably small window, so that the elements of interest appear large (e.g. you can shrink your browser window a bit)
• It's convenient if documentation PRs include links to the relevant functionality PRs they're documenting
  • e.g. you can write documents bluerobotics/cockpit#747 in the PR description
• If you're wanting to build the docs to test the output we also don't yet have decent instructions for that, but basically you'll need to
  1. install Zola
  2. Clone the repo on the main branch
     • I recommend doing this in a separate folder to the one you're working in
     • you can use the BlueOS-deploy branch instead of main if you want it to generate with the structure of https://blueos.cloud/docs (which only includes BlueOS and Cockpit) instead of https://docs.bluerobotics.com/ardusub-zola (which also includes ArduSub stuff)
  3. Initialise submodules
  4. Replace the contents of the relevant submodule folder with your changes folder
  5. Build the docs (using zola serve)
  6. Access to the generated http server from your browser, and check the docs at the relevant location
  7. Iterate
  8. PR when ready
     • you're welcome to open a draft PR if you want progress to be available before you specifically want it reviewed

An example command line log might look like

# clone your branch from your fork (should be based off Cockpit-devel-temp from the bluerobotics upstream)
git clone https://MY_USERNAME@github.com/MY_USERNAME/ardusub-zola -b My-Change-Branch-Name cockpit-docs-working
cd cockpit-docs-working # enter your changes folder
... # make your code changes
cd .. # go back to where you were (I normally just have two terminal tabs open, for easier switching)
# clone the main docs repo for building (can do from your fork, but not necessary just for building)
git clone https://github.com/bluerobotics/ardusub-zola ardusub-zola-building
cd ardusub-zola-building # enter your building folder
git submodule update --init --recursive # get the submodules
rm -r 'content/software/control-station/Cockpit - 1.0' # delete the current docs (note different structure if using BlueOS-deploy branch instead of main)
cp -r '../cockpit-docs-working' 'content/software/control-station/Cockpit - 1.0' # copy in your modified docs
zola serve # this needs to be done here, from the root of the build directory (e.g. not from in a content folder)
... # go to the generated http server, and navigate to /software/control-station/Cockpit - 1.0/advanced-usage
... # iterate
... # push your changes to your remote, and PR to the bluerobotics Cockpit-devel-temp branch when ready

[rafaellehmkuhl]

Looks good to me.

About the docs, since you've added several PRs that add functionality that don't have docs yet, I think we can merge this and you can work on the documentation for the other PRs all together.

@ES-Alexander what do you think?

[ES-Alexander]

About the docs, since you've added several PRs that add functionality that don't have docs yet, I think we can merge this and you can work on the documentation for the other PRs all together.

@ES-Alexander what do you think?

That’s fine with me, just good if we can sort out the docs before stable, and if one docs PR is documenting several feature PRs then it’s good if it can still link to all of them :-)