@dlee ,

Yes the new TOF sensor (IRS2975C) is more powerful that the previous generation. What I mean by that is that it can emit more IR power but also heats up more. Emitting more power allows the sensor detect objects at larger distances or objects that are not as reflective.

In current operating mode, the auto exposure control is enabled inside the sensor itself, which modulates the emitted IR power based on the returns that the sensor is getting. That is to say, the power draw will vary depending on what is in the view of the sensor. If there are obstacles nearby, the output power should be low, otherwise it can be high. At full power, the module can consume close to 0.8-0.9W

So the first solution, if design allows, is to add a heat spreader to dissipate the heat, which you already started experimenting with. The sensor has a large exposed copper pad in the back for heat sinking purposes for this exact reason. Just be careful not to short this pad to anything, use non-conducting (but heat transfering) adhesive pad between the sensor and heat spreader.

In terms of a software solution to the issue, we can query the temperature of the emitter. We can also control the maximum emitted power used by the auto exposure algorithm. That is to say, still leave the auto exposure running in the sensor, but limit the maximum power that it is allowed to use.

We are planning to add some software protection that limits the maximum output power as a function of the emitter temperature. This will require some implementation and testing.

Meanwhile, please consider using a heat spreader, which will be the best solution if you want to make use of the full sensor's operating range and not have our software limit the output power in order to prevent overheating.

Hello @Kashish-Garg-0

we have a curve that is "motor voltage vs rpm", meaning that for a desired RPM, it tells the ESC what average motor voltage should be applied. The average motor voltage is defined as battery_voltage * motor_pmw_duty_cycle. The battery voltage in this curve is in millivolts. Since you are typically controlling the desired RPM, as a user you do not need to worry about what "throttle" or voltage to apply - the ESC does this automatically in order to achieve the desired RPM. this calibration curve is used as a feed-forward term in the RPM controller. The ESC does support an "open loop" type of control where you specify the power from 0 to 100%, which is similar to a standard ESC, but PX4 does not use that ESC control mode.

By the way, you can test the ESC directly (not using PX4) using our voxl-esc tools (https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/tree/master/voxl-esc-tools) which works directly on VOXL2 or a standalone linux PC (or mac). voxl-esc-spin.py has a --power argument where you specify the power from 0 to 100, which translates directly to the average duty cycle applied to the motor.

Here is the calibration for the Starling V2 motor / propeller that we use:
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/blob/master/voxl-esc-params/mavic_mini_2/mavic_mini_2.xml?ref_type=heads#L63

Also, you can take a look at this post to see how to interpret those parameters a0, a1, a2 : https://forum.modalai.com/topic/2522/esc-calibration/2

We also have some dyno tests for this motor / propeller : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/flight-core-px4/dyno_data/-/blob/master/data/mavic_mini2_timing_test/mavic_mini2_modal_esc_pusher_7.4V_timing0.csv . We are not sure how accurate that is, but it can be used as a starting point. @James-Strawson can you please confirm that is the correct dyno data for the Starling V2 motors?

Alex

@reber34 , perhaps this approach can work for you:

• record a video encoded at high bit rate (using voxl-camera-server and voxl-record-video . Please note that the output of voxl-record-video will not be in a standard container (such as mp4, etc), but you can fix it with ffpeg : ffmpeg -r 30 -i voxl-record-video.h264 -codec copy videofile.mp4
• re-encode the video offline with desired codecs / bit rates / resolutions
• install gst-rtsp-launch which uses gstreamer to set up an RTSP stream https://github.com/sfalexrog/gst-rtsp-launch/
  • you will first need to figure out what gstreamer pipeline to use on voxl2 that will load your video and parse the h264/h265 frames (can use null sink for testing) and then use that pipeline with gst-rtsp-launch which will take the encoded frames and serve them over rtsp stream.
• gstreamer may be more flexible for tuning the encoding parameters of h264/h265 (compared to voxl-camera-server) and you can also use it in real time later (using voxl-streamer, which uses gstreamer under the hood)

Another alternative is to use voxl-record-raw-image to save raw YUVs coming from voxl-camera-server and then use voxl-replay and voxl-streamer - the latter will accept YUVs from the MPA pipe and encode them using the bit rate that you want. Note that depending on the image resolution, YUV images will take a lot more space than encoded video, but maybe that is also OK since VOXL2 has lots of storage.

Alex

@smilon ,

I believe you are correct! Thank you. We will double check this and fix.

@rdjarvis , the cpu (by default) will run in auto mode, meaning it will slow down under light load. Can you try to set the cpu to performance mode using voxl-set-cpu-mode perf and see if your performance inproves?

For front and rear stereo, which outputs for those cameras do you use? The code does debayering to mono and color for each camera, so disabling unneeded debayering can help.

Hello @Gicu-Panaghiu,

I am going to assume you are using VOXL1, since you did not specify..

We do have RAW8 and RAW10 support for OV7251. The selection of the format has to be done in several places.

First, you have to select the correct camera driver, specifically..

ls /usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251*.so
/usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251.so
/usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251_8bit.so
/usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251_hflip_8bit.so
/usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251_rot180_8bit.so
/usr/lib/libmmcamera_ov7251_vflip_8bit.so

there are 5 options and one of them is _8bit.so which means it will natively ouptput 8bit data (all others output 10 bit data).

the driver name, such as ov7251_8bit has to be the sensor name <SensorName>ov7251_8bit</SensorName> in /system/etc/camera/camera_config.xml.

You can check camera_config.xml for what sensor library is used for your OV7251.

When you run voxl-configure-cameras script, it will actually copy one of the default camera_config.xml that are set up for a particular use case, and I believe it will indeed select the 8bit one - this was done to save cpu cycles needed to convert 10bit to 8bit, since majority of the time only 8bit pixels are used.

Now, you mentioned that HAL_PIXEL_FORMAT_RAW10 is passed to the stream config and unfortunately this does not have any effect on what the driver outputs. If the low level driver (e.g. libmmcamera_ov7251_8bit.so) is set up to output RAW8, it will output RAW8 if you request either HAL_PIXEL_FORMAT_RAW8 or HAL_PIXEL_FORMAT_RAW10.

So if you update the camera_config.xml to the 10bit driver and just keep the HAL_PIXEL_FORMAT_RAW10 in the stream config (then sync and reboot), you should be getting a 10 bit RAW image from the camera. But since the camera server is currently expecting 8 bit image, if you just interpret the image as 8 bit, it will appear garbled, so you will need to handle the 10 bit image (decide what you want to do with it) in the camera server.

@wilkinsaf , M0027 was never shipped to any customers, as it was a test version of the ESC. So there should only be M0049, M0117, M0134 and M0129 (mini) ESCs out there. Like Vinny said, all of those ESCs have a blue status LED for each MCU.

If your ESC has a larger rectangular shape (as opposed to a square), it could be a really old ESC (Atmel-based, not STM32-based), which we do not really support any more. I hope this helps!

Alex

The ipk is available here now : http://voxl-packages.modalai.com/stable/voxl-hal3-tof-cam-ros_0.0.5.ipk - you should be able to use the launch file to choose between two modes (5=short range and 9=long range) and fps, which are listed in the launch file.

@Prabhav-Gupta , yes it seems like OpenCV and ROS YUV_NV12 formats do not match up. I will take a look at it.. it seems the ROS YUV is packed (interleaved) while standard for storing YUV NV12 is having two planes : plane 1 : Y (size: widthheight), plane 2 : UV (size: widthheight/2)

In the meantime.. you can stream a rtsp h264/h265 from VOXL (use decent quality so that image looks good) and use opencv to receive the stream and get decompressed images: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40875846/capturing-rtsp-camera-using-opencv-python

Would that work for you ? (unfortunately with rtsp stream, you will not get the full image metadata, like exposure, gain, timestamp, etc).

RTSP streaming can be done using voxl-streamer, which can accept either a YUV (and encode it) or already encoded h264/5 stream from voxl-camera-server.

Alex

@Rodrigo-Betances , yes, absolutely. I will provide your name to the team.

@jonathankampia ,

Have you checked that your Boson actually works (using a USB interface with either Flir GUI or a UVC interface)?

Also, is your Boson configured to send MIPI data in 8-bit raw format?

The camera server cannot change the FPS of Boson (or any of its streaming parameters). In fact there is no communication at all happening from VOXL2 to Boson (besides just probing / detection) - all the settings have to be configured by the user prior connecting to VOXL2 (including resolution, fps, etc).

https://docs.modalai.com/M0153/#boson-software-setup

Please double check these points..

Alex

@Alex-May , our lenses do not have any IP rating for waterproofing, so we cannot provide any guarantee regarding the performance when exposed to water.

Alex

@george-kollamkulam , did you have a working configuration and it stopped working after some event? Please provide some more details.

Thank you

Alex

@Gary-Holmgren,

Yes the two can work together.

You will need to modify the /usr/bin/voxl-px4-start file which loads all the modules based on the contents of /etc/modalai/voxl-px4.conf.

The voxl esc + voxl 2 io board is not a standard configuration, but you just need to make sure the following modules are started:

qshell voxl_esc start #(will start on default QUP2 / slpi uart port 2)
qshell voxl2_io start -p 7 #(use QUP7)

You can also just manually start these modules in px4 shell for testing. Watch the output of both modules in px4 console, because both modules will detect the corresponding board and will print useful information whether the corresponding board has been detected on the specified port). For this purpose, it may be easier to run voxl-px4 in foreground (instead of a service):

voxl-px4 -d

(-d disables the daemon mode and will let you interact with the px4 shell)

Alex

@shawn_ricardo , just to close the loop on the original issue.. the delay in the calibration procedure was caused by UART data or processing of the ESC feedback backing up. The fix is to just slow down the command rate, seen in this commit : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/commit/b512f9e3d5e695868775de3d40eedb2ad15cf6d9 . Additionally, using command line argument --cmd-rate 100 when you run the calibration script on VOXL2 will fix the issue.

Regarding the issue in the step response where the feedback data appears not smooth, i believe it is related to FTID's buffer / delay. FTDI adapters have this parameter latency_timer which is 16ms by default, which amount of time the FTDI board holds the RX'ed data before passing forwarding it to the PC (and vice versa, i believe). You can set that value to 1:

You can check this value:

cat /sys/bus/usb-serial/devices/ttyUSB0/latency_timer

And set it:

sudo su
echo 1 > /sys/bus/usb-serial/devices/ttyUSB0/latency_timer

You would need to do this every time you unplug / plug the FTDI device back in.

(note that this applies only to Linux PC, not VOXL2).

Besides this, i think the plots look good. It looks like you have set the kp pretty low, which keeps the response softer (less chance of de-sync).

Alex

@victochen , just to close the loop on the original issue.. the delay in the calibration procedure was caused by UART data or processing of the ESC feedback backing up. The fix is to just slow down the command rate, seen in this commit : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/commit/b512f9e3d5e695868775de3d40eedb2ad15cf6d9 . Additionally, using command line argument --cmd-rate 100 when you run the calibration script on VOXL2 will fix the issue.

@jonathankampia ,

(just FYI we just updated some more information about M0201 / M0153 here : https://docs.modalai.com/M0153/)

It seems that connection is not an issue in your case. However, the config file is not correct.

Please use the minimum config, as provided in the Hadron setup docs. We will update the Boson setup with a minimum config as well.

https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-hadron/#minimum-config

What is happening is that the ISP is not liking the custom resolution of the Boson (640x512) and it causes a low level buffer overrun, causing voxl to crash. So disabling small and large streams should fix it. use preview stream only and enable raw preview.

Here is the config snippet from the above link:

{
          "type": "boson",
          "name": "boson",
          "enabled":  true,
          "camera_id":    0,
          "fps":  30,
          "en_preview":   true,
          "en_misp":  false,
          "preview_width":    640,
          "preview_height":   512,
          "en_raw_preview":   true,
          "en_small_video":   false,
          "en_large_video":   false,
          "ae_mode":  "off"
      },

(please note that after you run voxl-camera-server with this minimal config entry, the camera server will auto populate some additional fields). Also note that i did not paste the full config here, just the camera entry - a few more lines at the top and bottom (mostly braces) are misssing.

I am going to add Boson support in our MISP processing pipeline so you will be able to get h264/h265 encoded boson video feed as well, but meanwhile you could just use voxl-streamer to encode these relatively small frames.

Please let me know if the config update fixes your issue.

Alex

@george-kollamkulam , also are you able to use voxl-esc tools to verify the voltage?

You can run the following command, which will not actually spin the motors, but will communicate with the ESC and receive feedback:

#stop px4
systemctl stop voxl-px4

cd /usr/share/modalai/voxl-esc-tools
./voxl-esc-spin.py --id 255 --power 0

The script should run and print out the voltage reported by the ESC.

Alex

@somalley ,

Very cool, thank you for sharing. We will try something like this.

Please note that we have observed that the wifi dongle, which is right under the gps receiver, causes some interference as well. Can you please try to repeat your test by unplugging the dongle completely?

A workaround to move the dongle to a different location is to use a different USB breakout board. Instead of M0141, use M0151 with a cable (JST GH to USB A Female).

Alex

@tonygurney , yes.

Please see the comment about pin availability and pin numbers here : https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/voxl-sdk/utilities/voxl-esc/-/blob/master/voxl-esc-tools/voxl-esc-pwm.py?ref_type=heads#L17

Please note that running voxl-esc-pwm.py script will use the serial port and cannot be done concurrently with PX4. This is a standalone tool, unlike voxl-send-esc-pwm-cmd tool, which sends a message to voxl-px4 and the pwm control message is then forwarded to the ESC by the voxl_esc px4 driver.

Alex