Topics created by Aidan Dempster

@Aidan-Dempster ,

Good question.

As you may already know, the 4 ESCs normally only send their feedback status packet when the host (flight controller) queries them. The feedback query bit is set for one ESC at a time when sending out the control packet to the 4 ESCs. The Flight controller requests the feedback from one ESC at a time in round robin fashion in order to avoid collisions on UART line. This is true for all ModalAI ESCs.

Now, the mini ESC M0129 has a special setup in terms of current sensing. IDs 0-2 do not have any current measurement, but ID3 measures the total current. In order to avoid confusion with individual current measurement, we have added a new Power Status message, which ID3 sends out in addition to the standard feedback. So when the Flight Controller asks ID3 to send feedback, the ID3 will send back the normal feedback packet and the power status packet. Here is a link in PX4 for your reference:

parsing of standard packet:
https://github.com/modalai/px4-firmware/blob/voxl-dev/src/drivers/actuators/modal_io/modal_io.cpp#L303

parsing of power status and sending out battery status to PX4:
https://github.com/modalai/px4-firmware/blob/voxl-dev/src/drivers/actuators/modal_io/modal_io.cpp#L393

It looks like the power status feature is only in voxl-dev branch of PX4 code at the moment.

Hopefully that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Alex

@Aidan-Dempster I will send you an email.

@Eric-Katzfey Oh, ha. I could have sworn it wasn't outputting my custom module status message. Checking again I see it though. That's silly.

@Aidan-Dempster You are correct on the mavlink console. This is not currently supported on VOXL2. You would have to log into the VOXL2 directly using adb (on the benchtop) or ssh (while flying) in order to interact directly with px4 shell.

@Aidan-Dempster Yes, HITL support will be migrated to the voxl-dev branch as well.

@Zachary-Lowell-0 Ah, yes I see what you mean. The secondary steps of updating gazebo's plugin path and loading a world with a model that uses the sitl plugins.

Ok, well in that case my only roadblock is building PX4 on my mac which, as far as I can tell, is a PX4 problem and not a VOXL problem so thank you for your help.