@Seungjae-Baek , the resolution of the camera should depend on the use case. However, it is also important to keep in mind what exactly you are doing with the images coming from the hires cameras. For example, if you set the resolution to 4K and you try to view those uncompressed images using voxl-portal, this process will be very taxing on the CPU for the following reason: when you view uncompressed images in voxl-portal, these images are encoded with a software JPG encoder and then sent from voxl2 to your browser. This process is very cpu-heavy. On the contrary, if you use h264 / h265 stream, it should be perfectly fine to encode 4K30 video to disk or even stream, since H264 / H265 encoding is done by a hardware encoder.

voxl-portal, actually does support showing h264 (but not h265) 30FPS streams, so that would be a lot more efficient for the CPU, since there would be no jpg encoding. Otherwise, if you are using raw frames (not _encoded) in voxl-portal , please keep in mind that you will always have a lot of cpu overhead. voxl-portal is designed for debugging / development purposes, so it's not necessarily the most efficient solution for video streaming. For real video streaming use cases, you would use h264 or h265 encoding and save to disk on voxl2 + stream the encoded video for remote viewing. You could encode the same camera source with two different resolutions / codecs / bitrates.

If you need help setting up a specific use case, please provide some details and I can help you further.

Alex

@Zachary-Lowell-0

Thank you for the feedback! This was very helpful

@mkriesel , a few tips..

I suspect FETtec ESC is using a pretty accurate xtal or accurate RC oscillator, so you should not need to calibrate the ESC You can check the current calibration by using QGC to control the individual motors to see at which command they start up and make sure that is very close to the same (typically around 1000us or a bit more) Additionally, you can spin up each motor with propeller at certain % power, lets say 20% or 30% and using an optical tachometer (RPM meter) to measure the speed of each motor Those are some sanity checks you can do without being able to calibrate and without having any ESC telemetry.

Regarding the ESC PWM range, the procedure is documented for VOXL2 IO board : https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-io-user-guide/#how-to-perform-esc-calibration -- please go over that and make sure you did it correctly.
Alex

@박지현 Unfortunately, for Ardupilot, our ESCs are only supported with UART interface when using the VOXL 2 / VOXL 2 mini as the flight controller. When using Flight Core v2 that is not supported.

@tom Thank you for your answer!

Unfortunately the overlay does not appear, even when the drone is armed. We are using Starling 2 drones with SDK 1.6.2.
Also in the voxl-open-vins-server.conf we can't find a setting for something related to the overlay.

Do you have any ideas what we can try to see the ov_overlay again?

Thank you in advance!

Actually, I see from the log that your FPV camera is IMX214 (please confirm).

So then my next questions are:

which Voxl2 SDK are you using? does the crash happen if you only view the Hadron EO stream (this is OV64B camera) can you please check the cpu temps when you view many cameras (using voxl-inspect-cpu)

The dmesg error suggests some sort of low level error during MIPI transmission, but it could be tied to the SoC overheating.

When voxl-portal is used to view images (especially in multi-view), the images on VOXL2 are converted from YUV to Jpeg using a software Jpeg encoder (which is very taxing on the cpu for large images). This can cause the cpu to overheat and start throttling operating frequencies to reduce the temperature). We are aware of this issue and it is on the list to fix the multi view to be more efficient and not overheat the CPU.

Alex

@Teon Hi,

Can I ask if you got the RTK set up working? I'm trying to do the same thing.

@leandro I found M0188 here: https://docs.modalai.com/M0188/#3d-drawings

@jonathankampia ,

Here is something i tried, you can try as well. You are right, there is a background service that may be taking over, I think i found how to disable it:

systemctl disable QCMAP_ConnectionManagerd systemctl disable qti_pppd systemctl disable qtid rm /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/QCMAP_ConnectionManagerd.service rm /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/qti_pppd.service rm /lib/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/qtid.service #edit: instead of disabling the above 3 services and removing the entries from `multi-user.target.wants`, it seems you can do the following: systemctl mask QCMAP_ConnectionManagerd systemctl mask qti_pppd systemctl mask qtid # you may want to disable dhcpcd as well, but i dont think that is strictly necessary: systemctl disable dhcpcd

Now, set up static connection:

#create a new network interface file vi /etc/systemd/network/10-eth0.network [Match] Name=eth0 [Network] Address=192.168.xx.xx/24 Gateway=192.168.xx.1 DNS=8.8.8.8 1.1.1.1

enable networkd

systemctl enable systemd-networkd

Then reboot voxl2...

I think if dhcpcd is enabled, it may first take over the interface, but then networkd takes it back.. For example, here is the log from networkd when dhcpcd is enabled:

... Dec 10 06:01:00 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: dummy0: Gained carrier Dec 10 06:01:00 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: dummy0: Gained IPv6LL Dec 10 06:01:11 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained carrier Dec 10 06:02:13 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained IPv6LL Dec 10 06:02:13 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Configured Dec 10 06:02:13 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: docker0: Link UP Dec 10 06:02:21 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Lost carrier Dec 10 06:02:36 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained carrier Dec 10 06:02:38 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained IPv6LL Dec 10 06:02:38 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Configured

and the log with dhcpcd disabled:

... Dec 10 06:02:13 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: bond0: Link is not managed by us Dec 10 06:02:13 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: sit0: Link is not managed by us Dec 10 06:02:14 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Link UP Dec 10 06:02:38 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained carrier Dec 10 06:09:56 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Gained IPv6LL Dec 10 06:09:56 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: eth0: Configured Dec 10 06:09:56 m0054 systemd-networkd[1126]: docker0: Link UP

Can you try and see if that solves your issue?

Alex

I did some additional testing and was able to narrow things down a bit. After reconfiguring the WiFi as a SoftAP using voxl-wifi and then rebooting the VOXL, the network now shows up consistently again. So the broadcast issue seems to be resolved for the moment. However, the core problem remains: I still can’t actually connect to the AP — the connection attempt starts, prompts for the password, and then fails just like before.

If anyone has ideas on what else I could check or has seen similar behavior with this setup, I’d really appreciate the help.

@alan123 , yes, the 12-pin connector on VOXL2 (J19) was designed such that the first 6 pins are compatible with a lot of existing GPS recevier modules. Please double check the pins and you should use a 12-pin connector to plug into VOXL2 (may need to re-pin your cable).

Alex

@clange Yes, definitely. All the support to build a Debian package for installation is in https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/tree/master/libraries/AP_HAL_QURT/packaging

I fix this issue.
switch the Pin1 & Pin4 of MCBL-00010 cable is OK

@taiwohazeez , the image is indeed blurry. Did the camera come like this or did something happen to the camera / lens?

Also, i am assuming that the blur is not coming from the camera moving around (that is to say the camera is stationary during those image captures).

Please inspect the lens on the outside to make sure it's not scratched or damaged, as this can also contribute to the issue.

In any case, adjusting focus on a camera is usually as simple as turning the lens slightly CW or CCW. Since the image is almost focus, i expect that the adjustment would be within 1 full turn from the existing lens position in the lens holder. If the camera lens is being held by a plastic mount, it should have a screw on the side of the plastic mount, which clamps the mount around the lens. The screw needs to be loosened and then you can use the focus tool to turn the lens slightly while looking at the image view in voxl-portal. For this particular camera with a wide lens, the hyperfocal distance will be around 10cm, meaning that when properly focused, everything beyond 10cm away should appear in focus. With this in mind, you should some target (checkerboard is fine) 0.3 - 0.5m away and turn the lens back and forth (with the plastic tool) to try achieve the best focus. If you cannot achieve good focus (the best focus is still blurry), it probably means that either the lens is damaged dirty (front or back side of the lens).

If you do unscrew the lens all the way out (by turning counter-clockwise until the lens comes out), don't leave the camera exposed like this for a long period of time, so that dust does not get on the camera sensor.

Also, what is the exposure and gain reported in the stats below the image in the voxl-portal view, when you view the camera stream (without the calibration). The environment seems pretty dark, i would recommend more lighting, but let's double check the reported exposure and gain (from auto exposure). Also, please make sure your checkerboard pattern is as flat as possible (this is unrelated to blurry image, but will result in better calibration results).

Please try focusing the camera and let me know if you have any questions.

Alex

@Seungjae-Baek
image.png IMG_0429.jpg
One more question: Should we use 5G antenna, not LTE? As I know when we buy the 5g modem the default antenna is the one with LTE.

@Capstone-0 Our drone crashed and we ditched our project but has ModalAI added support for AT commands for the 5G (I assume EM9291) modem yet? If not, I figured out how to do it and posted instructions here

https://forum.modalai.com/post/19131

Once you get those commands, you can set up a service to query the modem for its signal strength and pump the output somewhere. Someone else in that forum discusses it a bit.

@jmltt SDK testing for Sentinel ended at SDK 1.4.0

That doesn't mean that newer releases won't work, it just means we don't put it through the SW QA testing cycles that we do with our newer platforms.

You likely won't see any major performance improvements on Sentinel with newer SDK releases but there may be some nice quality of life additions such as helper scripts, voxl-portal updates and others.

If you have any questions about any specific packages feel free to ask.

@ashley-miller , for this motor (28xx class), you should use the following ESC M0138 FPV ESC :

https://www.modalai.com/products/m0138
https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-fpv-esc-datasheet/

The mini ESC (M0129) is designed for small and lightweight drones and mini FPV racers (750g or less for slow flyers and 500g or less for mini FPV drones).

The peak power for one of these motor is almost 1kW each - the mini ESC cannot handle that for several reasons, such as peak current capacity, thermal.

If you would like to use the 2808 motor, please choose the M0138 FPV ESC and perform motor calibration using voxl-esc tools : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/blob/master/voxl-esc-tools/calibration.md

Also, please review the following FAQ: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-escs/faq/

Alex