ModalAI Forum

Hi Sakthivel, I just heard from one of our SW engineers as follows: Yes https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-linux-user-guide/#spi0---camera-group-0-spi However, we are going to change J8 to a UART in next release. The current download available is Voxl2 Platform Release 1.2.1-0.7 from downloads.modalai.com release notes: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-system-image/#121 as of 1.2.0 the J6 and J7 SPI are available. J8 is too now, but next release it will become a UART. We will update our docs accordingly, and I think we have future plans to make J6-J8 buildable by the end user as either SPI or UART. So this switch of J8 to UART is likely a temporary one for users.

Hi @Swaroop-B-Deshpande , There's other add-on boards that could be used, but I'm guessing you are looking for a non-add on board solution and want to use USB? Right now, the only way to get to USB if through an add-on board.

VOXL 2 uses apt, and not opkt. Check out the docs here: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-platform-release/ You should just need to run apt update apt upgrade

@Eric-Katzfey so I also tried deleting /usr/include/gphoto2, and it still gave the same error. I don't think I had installed gphoto2 separately, but it wasn't a completely clean install. I had to install ROS melodic, and it uninstalled parts of the voxl sdk, and I was trying to reinstall voxl-suite. I don't necessarily need gphoto2, but it's part of what apt tries to install when I run apt install voxl-suite. Side question: I saw that there was /opt/ros/melodic that came with the voxl image, but there was no setup.bash to source, or is this located elsewhere on the system?

Thanks Jeff, we'll try to reproduce this and see what we can do here to resolve. Will post updates here as we have them.

@mrawding Wanted to reply here and say sudo did not work but sudo su allowed us to overcome this problem

@Chad-Sweet I am also looking for a Voxl2 IO. My project has come to a halt without it.

Hi @roy , I don't have quantitive data to give you, except that even in the native setup, we are doing a bunch of "translations". For example, one of the DSPs (sensors DSP, sometimes called Sensors Low Power Island (SLPI), at least on the older platform and carried over by us out of habit)) is talking SPI to an IMU, and then that data get's passed via mUORB to the applications processor and in some scenarios for our vision processing code that runs on the application processor. (We've now actually hooked up an IMU directly to the applications processor for vision processing and PX4 has it's own, but the data path and delays introduced did not cause issues for us) This graphic is from: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-px4-developer-guide/ [image: 1654876616605-2e82e9d0-a1bd-49a3-b9ac-1790090ec700-image.png] It shows how we're doing things roughly. So you can imagine this: have an external flight controller connected via UART (as explained above, through an add on board or soon via a camera connetor J8) use our voxl-mavlink-server has a UART implantation that can be used as reference to get MAVLink to/from your Flight Controller INTO VOXL2 Maybe not answering all your questions, but keep the back and forth going and we can widdle away

Yes this fixed the issue. We are able to fly in position control mode indoors. Thanks!

@Moderator Thanks for the clarification, we will not expect a solution to this then.

There haven't been any hardware changes, only software, since the closed beta.

Thank you for the additional information. While the OMX encoder is not currently working, are you aware of any resources on the VOXL2 that could allow me to stream low latency (<.25s) video data? Using GStreamer or FFMPEG or any other tools? Thanks.

Hi Aks, For you first question, yes the internal sensor is the same for the pinhole and fisheye cameras, if you want to have stereo fisheye you can buy them here and plug them into the stereo flexes. The camera calibration procedure is identical for the two platforms (we have the same voxl sdk running on both), though we've made a few improvements to the camera calibration procedure that'll make the extrinsics calibration much more straightforward than what's currently in the docs (will be updated when the release is live). Something to note is that we haven't tested the extrinsics calibration procedure with fisheye cameras, and there may need to be some tweaks made if you're trying to use them as a stereo pair. If you just want more fisheye cameras, it'll work fine as-is.

@Eric-Katzfey Is Voxl2 IO hardware ready to buy? If yes can you please provide purchase link?

Also, how should mavros (px4.launch) be run with the internal px4 on the voxl2?