The Dronecode Foundation hosts an ecosystem of open-source projects, developers, and contributing organizations. Dronecode is an umbrella foundation (part of The Linux Foundation) hosting open-source projects that offer solutions to robotics developers looking to build Aerial solutions.

The PX4 Autopilot is an open-source flight controller project that offers developers a stable foundation for building drones. The project sustains a community of thousands of robotics developers and hundreds of companies building complex drone solutions on top of PX4, including everything from wedding photography to package delivery for Walmart.

Our humble open-source project has supported an ever-growing community of contributors at times with little to no resources. With the growing complexity of demanding robotics workflows, proving reliable and reproducible testing to guarantee the safety of our codebase has been a constant challenge.

I will share the cautionary tale of how not to run CI for a robotics project, the scary times when we wanted to delete our whole infra and start fresh, and how we found the strength to move on. I will also share the gory details behind running an open-source robotics project and the supporting tooling needed to support our complex workflows and demanding community.

Our Continuous Integration pipeline is far from sophisticated, but it is responsible for supporting thousands of developers and is the backbone of our infrastructure. Some of the topics I will be discussing: Maximizing containers for reproducible builds Running a hardware-in-the-loop service with embedded hardware connected to the cloud. Moving from Jenkins to GitHub Actions Hosting our own GitHub Actions runners Build patterns for better GitHub Actions development across distributed teams. Building an array of upwards of 60 builds per pull request in GitHub Actions