We need more UART ports. Could we use the UART ports on the VOXL2 board?

[John Nomikos 0]

Good afternoon,

On our setup, we are using a VOXL2 with a 5G hat which is connected to an external flight controller (cube). That external flight controller uses Ardupilot. All of our telem ports on the external flight controller are being used. The UART port that the 5G hat has is being used to communicate with the external flight controller.

What are your best recommendations on getting another UART port to use with a gimbal?

I notice that there is both port J18 (UART ESC) and J19 - External Sensors (2x UART/ 2x I2C). Can any of the UARTs be used with a gimbal and be intractable through linux? I know that the UARTs on the bare board are supposed to communicate with PX4 through the DSP but I was wondering if there is a way to expose these to be used just like any other UART port?

Thank you,

John Nomikos.

[John Nomikos 0]

@John-Nomikos-0

I do see that there is info on doing this with the VOXL1 using libvoxl_io:

https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-serial-io/

I did find libqrb5165_io. Is this used for the same purpose?

https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/core-libs/libqrb5165-io

[John Nomikos 0]

@John-Nomikos-0

I found this info about DSP UARTs being available for use with external flight controllers starting in SDK 1.1.

https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-external-flight-controller/#dsp-uarts-via-apps-proc

So I will try upgrading to SDK 1.1, connecting an external flight controller to DSP UART, and then connecting the gimbal to the UART on top of the 5G hat.

I wonder if it will work if my external FCU is on Ardupilot and I'm using mavlink_router instead of voxl-mavlink-server