VOXL ESC with Cube running PX4

Chase Riley

I currently have a VOXL2 running SDK 1.1 with a VOXL ESC (MDK-M0134-6-01). I am looking to add a Cube running PX4 instead of having PX4 running on the VOXL2. What would be the best way to accomplish this? Am I able to run the latest dev version of PX4 1.15 or would I need to run the VOXL Branch of PX4 to be able to talk to the ESC?

Eric Katzfey

@Chase-Riley We load and test our forked version of PX4 on our flight core products but the mainline PX4 should work with our ESC. Having said that it's not something we have been testing. We are planning to move away from our fork to mainline PX4 in the near future for all of our products.

Chase Riley

@Eric-Katzfey I am waiting for a order from you all now that will allow me to test with the ESC. Once I get that in I will be able to connect it to the cube and see if it works.

I was able to load the mainline PX4 on a cube I have here. I looked in the parameters and did not see any of the VOXL_ESC_xxxx parameters listed. Is this something that should only appear when the VOXL ESC is connected?

Alex Kushleyev

@Chase-Riley , we load the VOXL_ESC params when we set up the flight board for a particular vehicle, since the params are vehicle dependent. If you do not define these params and start the voxl_esc driver, it will define and use the params with default values. you could just try running voxl_esc start in your px4 flight contoller terminal and after that you should see VOXL_ESC params show up (param show VOXL_ESC*)

Chase Riley

@Alex-Kushleyev Are you saying run this in the Mavlink Console in QGC? If so I receive "command not found"

Alex Kushleyev

@Chase-Riley, yes. Well, normally i test this using px4 shell. If the command is not found, maybe the module is not built for this target, you may need to add it to the build, like we do in our FC1 and FC2 stm32 builds.

Eric Katzfey

@Chase-Riley Yes, as Alex said, most standard builds do not include the voxl_esc driver. Only the ModalAI products include it as a standard part of the build. So you will need to add that to you build configuration.