VOXL 2 Mini with Mini 4 in 1 ESC - No battery Information

Jack Bishop

Hello There

I am using the Voxl 2 Mini with the Mini 4 in 1 ESC, we are not getting any battery data from ESC being sent to the Flight Controller.

We have installed the firmware and parameter file via the ESC tools and are able to spin the motor in Qgroundcontrol.
Despite this we are unable to get any battery data, using voxl-inspect-battery in the adb shell we get each column for voltage, charge, current but they are reading N/A

Is there any configuration we are required to do to get this data?

Many thanks

Jack

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Eric Katzfey

@Jack-Bishop From the command prompt in an adb shell what do you get if you issue the command px4-listener battery_status?

Jack Bishop

@Eric-Katzfey Hello Eric

When I use px4-listener battery_status I get the response, never published.

Eric Katzfey

@Jack-Bishop Are you using SDK 1.0.0? Support for the mini ESC battery status message was added only in SDK 1.0.0

Alex Kushleyev

@Jack-Bishop ,

The mini ESC board you have is running slightly older firmware (Version 37), which did not support reporting battery voltage and current. Please update your firmware for the ESC to Version 38, this can be done right from VOXL2 mini:

voxl-esc upgrade_firmware

This should update the firmware but due to a change in params structure, the old params on the ESC are no longer usable, so you will need to install params as well:

voxl-esc upload_params

(you will need to choose which vehicle you are setting up).

If you would like to install custom parameters, you can navigate to /usr/share/modalai/voxl-esc-tools/ and run the following command:

python3 voxl-esc-upload-params.py --params-file <path-to-params-file>

The default parameters are stored in /usr/share/modalai/voxl-esc-params/ and you can use an existing one if that matches your hardware configuration or create a customized ESC param file.

Then you can perform a scan to confirm the firmware version:

voxl-esc scan

and verify params

cd /usr/share/modalai/voxl-esc-tools/
python3 voxl-esc-verify-params.py

Jack Bishop

@Alex-Kushleyev @Eric-Katzfey

Managed to get everything up and running with your advice - One thing I needed to do first was flash V1.0.0 as the system was running V1.0.0beta and had an older version of ESC tools V1.08.
Once V1.0.0 was flashed the ESC tools was update to 1.20 and allowed me to update to the ESC firmware version 38.

After everything flashed and updated I now have the battery information in QGroundControl!

Many thanks again for your assistance!