GPS & IMU into VOXL2 (outside of dsp)
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We're looking to pull in GPS and IMU data into the VOXL2. We are not using the DSP. We are using an external flight controller with the VOXL2 as a standalone SBC for our autonomy. We want to use an external IMU and Compass to improve our state estimation. What would be your recommendations on doing this?
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@ryan-langlois1 How are you connecting your external flight controller to VOXL 2? For the external IMU and compass, which units were you considering using? There are 2 IMUs on the VOXL 2 board as well, would you rather use one of those?
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Hi @ryan-langlois1 ,
Also, check out this, we have a few options to expose an apps_proc UART and then we can pump MAVLink through it between the two systems.
This is a use case we are internally using presently, but it's not in the production release just yet (it's in the dev branch of
voxl-mavlink-serverhttps://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-mavlink-server/-/tree/dev) -
@Eric-Katzfey We're using a daughter board; yours (the 3.0 with UART & USB) and we have a custom one that essentially does the same as yours, but we're converting USB to ethernet on-board. This eliminates our need for a fat external USB to eth converter. As for external IMU, we're considering a vectornav VN200. We currently fly that same unit on a different airframe. We are also considering using the ones onboard the VOXL2, but I'm assuming it's a low cost "hobby-grade" mems? I believe it's the icm-42688 so I'm looking at it online and comparing to the vectornav units.
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@modaltb thanks for the info, but we already have our UART configuration working. See my response to Eric Katzfey for explanation. We're about to start doing some gps-denied research in-which we expect to have gps, and then have gps get jammed. We'll need a better IMU than the mems on pixhawk and VOXL2.
For what it's worth, we're starting small here. GPS-denied SLAM is not our wheelhouse. We develop fully autonomous "plays" and swarming algorithms on fixed-wing UAS.
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@ryan-langlois1 said in GPS & IMU into VOXL2 (outside of dsp):
vectornav VN200
Yes, we have a couple of the 42688 on board. What are the external interfaces on the Vectornav unit?
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@Eric-Katzfey 232. I'm not terribly worried about it. I've worked with their VN-100 series before, which we might go with. A logic shifter should work fine. So maybe we open another UART? Our custom daughter board connects to J3 and J5 so we can get more than 1 UART even though we're currently only using UART7? from the J3.