No connection to VOXL after voxl-configure-vision-px4

kasper-airflight

Hello,

We have recently acquired a VOXL which we are attempting to setup to use collision prevention and VIO features for our Pixhawk 4(running PX4).

We have connected stereo cameras and a tracking camera, as well as WiFi antennas and are currently powering it off a 2S LiPO battery.

Initially we were able to connect via ADB to the VOXL and changed the WiFi mode to station, connected to our WiFi and used opkg update + opkg upgrade to make sure the software was the latest version. We then ran voxl-configure-cameras succesfully.

However after running voxl-configure-vision-px4 and rebooting we are no longer able to communicate with the device. The green LED flashes when we connect power, but no device shows up running adb devices on our dev machine. Connecting it to our Pixhawk 4, we see no MAVLink packages indicating that it is running either.

What steps do you recommend we take from here to troubleshoot?

modaltb

Hi @kasper-airflight ,

I've seen bootup issues like this with loose or incorrect (backwards) camera connections, it might be worth trying to bootup without the cameras attached if possible and then add one camera at a time to trouble shoot.

If this doesn't resolve, there's a chance that adb shows up momentarily, and if it does we can disable voxl-vision-px4 as a test:

disconnect VOXL from host (or power off)
run the following (preferably in a bash script as it needs to be done quickly)

adb wait-for-device
adb shell systemctl stop voxl-vision-px4
adb shell systemctl disable voxl-vision-px4

Worst case we can reflash the VOXL, we are getting a debug board in the mail to you it looks like so we can help with that if needed.

Thanks!
Travis

tom

@modaltb @kasper-airflight If it's easier for you than creating a script with those commands you can also do it all in one command with adb wait-for-device shell systemctl stop voxl-vision-px4 && systemctl disable voxl-vision-px4

kasper-airflight

Hi guys,
The help was much appreciated. We've managed to break through to the device now!

It appears the problem we were facing was two-fold.

The tracking camera connection was indeed backwards - We had (wrongly) assumed that the camera should be connected such that the cable is leading out from the device, not inwards.
We had used 2x extension cables for each of the cameras(stereo, tracking), the device does not boot with any extension cable on the tracking camera. It does boot with 4x extension cables on the stereo cameras though. I am curious if this is to be expected or if our tracking sensor may be faulty?

Many thanks for the quick assistance.

modaltb

Hi @kasper-airflight ,

We test each of the cameras with a SINGLE extension before bagging it up.

Am I reading correctly that you're using 2x and 4x of the cables? This isn't something we've tried...

Thanks!
-Travis

kasper-airflight

Hi @modaltb ,
Thank you for that insight.

That was indeed our intended use case, given the size of our vehicle, but as we have experienced, image quality does indeed degrade (looking at rqt-image-view) using that many extension cables.

We are currently investigating placement options to see if we can fit the VOXL and sensors such that we can avoid the extensions.

We have also learned about the existence of extension interfaces for MIPI CSI-2 (THine for example provides such a solution). Do you or your team have experience with these solutions?