ModalAI Forum

@kestrelsystemsbp , Thank for clarifying. Indeed the camera-calibration app does not work well for high resolution camera calibration because the processing is not optimized for the large image size (takes too long to process a frame). The workaround for now is to use down-scaled image for calibration. I will follow up with instructions for the easiest way to do this. Alex

@Moderator Which configuration allows 2D ground mapping, does it have a downward facing camera? Is there a whole kit of ground control station (controller) available (meaning ready to fly/control, including receiver, display, joysticks...)? Resolution in real time and latency of the video streaming?

@pettertei I'd recommend filing an RMA and we can debug the issue: https://www.modalai.com/pages/rma

@tom It's okay, I managed to figure it out. Just had to change the RC protocol in the px4-conf file.

@Taka , as you are aware that this configuration is not supported, so you would be testing it at your own risk (in terms of drone flying normally after all the changes and potential issues with motor overheating). Electrically, Starling 2 is compatible with 3S. The entry point of power into Starling 2 is the mini ESC, which is rated for up to 4S Lipo. https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-mini-esc-datasheet/ Now, regarding the motor.. you would need to do a ESC motor calibration using the following procedure : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/blob/master/voxl-esc-tools/calibration.md?ref_type=heads (mainly update the battery voltage, test and update rpm limits, calibrate the feed forward (pwm_vs_rpm) curve, probably lower (a little bit) start-up power, confirm start up is smooth). You may also want to slightly lower the kp term (proportional term in the rpm controller, to account for increase in battery voltage, so that the controller does not become more aggressive). Maybe lower that from 100 to 66-75 or so. These should be the ESC params that are loaded on your ESC : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/blob/master/voxl-esc-params/D0014_starling_1504_3000kv_ms_props/D0014_starling_1504_3000kv_ms_props.xml?ref_type=heads . You can double check this using voxl-esc-verify-params.py script and then modify these params with your changes. The esc tools are already installed on voxl2 in /usr/share/modalai/voxl-esc-tools. The main issue you may see is if you apply full power to the motor continuously, it may overheat due to the fact that it was designed for 2S. However, you can artificially cap your maximum rpm (in esc params) to prevent the motor from going to higher rpms (and update your px4 params for max rpm accordingly). Depending on what you are trying to achieve, you will probably have to put some SW protection and prevent the motor from overheating. If you are OK with waiting for a few days, I can give the motor a spin at 3S and just confirm nothing BAD will happen. Alex

@paul-ammer If you aren't doing any VIO related flight you can disable voxl-qvio-server and voxl-imu-server. I believe you may still need voxl-vision-hub if you're communicating with a ground control station but not 100% positive on that, voxl-mavlink-server may be enough.

@dguido2023 Sorry you are struggling with your Ghost Receiver. Can you please help with an explicit issue or question? We don't have a problem configuring these in the factory, so maybe we can get you setup quickly. Have you looked through this guide? https://docs.modalai.com/orqa-ghost/ Which SKU of Starling 2 do you have? Was it preconfigured with a Ghost receiver? What version of SDK are you using? If you installed the receiver yourself, how is it connected to the VOXL 2? Are there specific configuration steps you tried that failed?

@tom That did the trick, thanks for the help!

Hi @kestrelsystemsbp , the GPS interference is an ongoing investigation and there are several threads about this on the forum. For Starling 2, we found that moving the wifi dongle to a different location (or offsetting the GPS receiver) helps with interference (it is located right under the gps receiver). Also, elevating the gps receiver and shielding, should help. Please also read through the following discussion related to Starling 2 Max : https://forum.modalai.com/topic/4226/starling-2-max-no-gps-data/ I am not saying that you need such a big mast, but you may need to experiment a bit to figure out how to improve. I am sorry for the inconvenience and let me know if you need any guidance for checking the signal strength, as described in the other thread. You do not have to use the live streaming plot for checking the individual signal strength -- you could do it directly using the terminal. enable satellite info to be published from px4 (and start voxl-px4) param set GPS_SAT_INFO 1 query satellite info using px4-listener: px4-listener satellite_info TOPIC: satellite_info satellite_info timestamp: 2611309684 (0.868903 seconds ago) count: 13 svid: [5, 8, 10, 13, 15, 18, 23, 24, 27, 32, 131, 133, 138, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] used: [1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] elevation: [11, 1, 30, 11, 47, 64, 68, 59, 13, 15, 27, 19, 33, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] azimuth: [74, 232, 213, 36, 37, 138, 241, 85, 209, 172, 165, 173, 158, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] snr: [0, 0, 26, 17, 32, 14, 29, 30, 15, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] prn: [5, 8, 10, 13, 15, 18, 23, 24, 27, 32, 131, 133, 138, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] In open sky conditions, you should have a number of satellites above 40dB (which is not the case in this example i just pasted above). You can see the examples of the good and bad signal in the Starling 2 MAX thread i mentioned above. Alex

@ramp I have the same issue. Can I ask you how did you solve it ?

The 3000mAh packs use Sony VTC60 LiIon cells and the 4000mAh packs use Amprius Silicon Anode cells

the fix has been committed to voxl-camera-server dev branch : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/services/voxl-camera-server/-/commit/520bad13a573dde500d36cf1008e67102e0b6078 . I tested it for the rotated and non-rotated use case using voxl-streamer. Alex

@ramp Yes you could still do HITL with a starling 2 max, would just require unplugging the ESC from the VOXL 2 and using that connector

@starlinguser Thank you for your response, now my problem is resolved, I just used "voxl-configure-mpa --debug" and now everything is working fine. thank you

Hi @muhammad-kazim-0 , For saving h264 / h265 you can use voxl-streamer tool to serve the video via RTSP from VOXL2 and then on your host PC use ffmpeg or ffplay (or similar tools) to view / save the video. For simple playback of rtsp video, you can run a command on your linux PC : ffplay rtsp://<voxl-ip>:<rtsp-port>/live -- the IP of voxl2 you can get using ifconfig, the rtsp port will be printed out by voxl-streamer when it strarts up. You can run multiple instances of voxl-streamer on different ports, please check help for this command-line tool. I would not recommend streaming uncompressed images for the purpose of recording the video. Just to clarify, any camera stream that is not named *_encoded is going to be uncompressed RAW8 or YUV format and when you view it using voxl-portal, what happens is the back-end of voxl-portal (running on voxl2) will take the original image from the requested stream and it will use JPG compression before sending the JPG to your voxl-portal in the browser for viewing. Jpeg is a lot less efficient than h264/5, so you will need a lot more bandwidth. You can still use the jpeg approach if you really want to. For example, you can use ffplay to play the jpeg stream (this is kind of an undocumented feature): ffplay -f mjpeg -framerate 30 -probesize 32 -analyzeduration 0 -fflags -nobuffer -flags low_delay -i http://<voxl-ip>/video_raw/<camera-stream-name> Please note if you use these streams (which are generated by voxl-portal backend), if you also concurrently actually use voxl-portal in browser, the streams might interfere / stop. You should also be able to figure out how to use ffplay / ffmpeg to how save the file to disk. If you have too many jpeg streams (especially high resolution camera), VOXL2 may not be able to keep up. Specifically for hires streams, you should definitely make use of the encoded streams. You can always use the tool top on voxl2 to check the cpu usage of individual processes, specifically voxl-portal to make sure it is not overloading the system. if the streams that you are getting are not the FPS that you are expecting, then it probably means that voxl2 cannot keep up with sending the streams (either encoding to jpg or limited network bandwidth). Please try this out and let me know if you have any questions. Alex

@teddy-zaremba EV_CTRL changed from 15 in 1.15 and earlier to 0 in 1.16. Either check this parameter is set to 15 or run "voxl-configure-px4-params -p MRB-D0006" for Starling V1 or "voxl-configure-px4-params -p MRB-D0005-V2" for Starling V2.

@Taka (1) VOXL 2 does not have any RF transmitters. RF could be transmitted by external WiFi, RC, Cellular modem, etc., etc. (2) How are you configuring the WiFi module? Is it in access point mode or station mode? The SDK will set everything up correctly when using the WiFi in "SoftAP" or access point mode.