VOXL 2 IO Board troubleshooting - Driver will not start

[valvarez]

Hello @Jeremy-Frederick
I'm just trying to perform the same operation. What servo have you used? How did you make the connection? I have doubts about the 5V power supply for the servos and the 3.3V signal from the IO board.

Thank you!

[Jeremy Frederick]

@valvarez Any PWM based servo should work, we're using 5g servos with very little torque capability and haven't seen any issues with the power supply capabilities of the IO board in this regard. I connected the PWM Signal to output 1 on the IO board and the 5V and G of the same port. Has been working consistently through QGC.

[Vinny]

Hi @Jeremy-Frederick @valvarez
ModalAI has not designed any power supply reference voltages on JST connectors as a REF or Power Tap Off as capable of powering servos.
If you wish to power micro-servos then please do so at your own risk. However, you may likely damage your ModalAI hardware since we do not have any back EMF/Stall/Load dump protection on any of our JST connectors.

Servos need to have their independent supply from your system battery.
Apologies we have not made that clearer in our Tech Docs.

Thanks!

[Jeremy Frederick]

@Vinny Appreciate the heads up

[valvarez]

@Jeremy-Frederick said in VOXL 2 IO Board troubleshooting - Driver will not start:

@Eric-Katzfey I'm not looking to run RC through the IO board, I'm using external RC commands for control. I'm looking to utilize the PWM outputs on the board to control a servo for a dropper mechanism. I made the change and am commanding the start of the voxl2_io driver successfully. As of now I am still unable to drive a servo through the QGC actuators tab, all the correct parameters have been loaded.

Hello @Jeremy-Frederick
Do you remember how you made that change? I can't find a way to change the port

[Eric Katzfey]

@valvarez It's the -p option as shown in the screenshot above.

[valvarez]

@Eric-Katzfey Replaced it with -p 7

[valvarez]

@valvarez UPDATE: I took another IOBoard and connected it to see what happened. To my surprise, it has shown something different. After updating it, I get the same thing as with the other one. The firmware that im using is voxl2_io_firmware_m0065_v1_35_58c82813.bin from https://developer.modalai.com/asset/7

[valvarez]

@valvarez UPDATE 2: With that firmware is working: https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl2-io/-/blob/master/voxl2-io-tools/firmware/modalai_m0065_firmware_v0_2_RC1_f94baad1.bin

[Alex Kushleyev]

@valvarez , yes, this is the expected correct behavior.

I believe you were initially using older M0065 firmware (version 1) as well as older PX4 build which was working with that version of M0065 (VOXL2 IO board). However that release had some issues that were fixed and you should not use firmware version 1.

The older PX4 version used a different (old) driver for the voxl2-io board, and you can tell that because the debug print was very short and it accepted SW version 1:

SLPI: Detected M0065 protocol version. SW: 1, HW: 35

If you see that, it means you are using outdated (buggy) software. The latest (stable) firmware is verion 2 and the corresponding PX4 driver will require that version and print out a lot more information about the board and the VOXL2_IO params.

Alex