Out of the Box Starling 2 Max Configuration

brandon

Hi,

Is there recommended default configuration for out-of-the-box Starling 2 Max's for generic outdoor flight?

We've been experiencing the following problems across 1 LTE drone and 5 non-LTE drones, intermittently. The primary symptom was originally unreliable altitude/height measurements on the LTE drone. Sometimes reporting height wrong by 10m+ or more, or negative altitudes. There also has been consistent "Preflight fail: height estimate unstable" and similar messages, though the LTE drone manages to arm more often with these displayed errors.

After swapping to the non-LTE drones we had some crashes. Here are the two flights we had that crashed, and despite being able to arm, they were fighting against control inputs from the pilot once in the air and seemed like they had little or no GPS fix based on our review of the logs:

starling2-max (D0012):~$ voxl-version
system-image: 1.8.04-M0054-14.1a-perf
kernel:       #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Mar 24 22:31:58 UTC 2025 4.19.125
hw platform:  M0054
mach.var:     1.0.1
SKU:          MRB-D0012-4-V2-C29-T9-M28-X0
voxl-suite:   1.5.0

Thank you for any guidance or support

Moderator

@brandon from the factory, it is typically configured for VIO flight. You should configure for GPS as VIO may not be well tuned for your outdoor flights

You can find some helper parameter files here: https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-px4-params/-/tree/master/params/v1.14/EKF2_helpers?ref_type=heads