@tom Thanks for your thoughts Tom, it was new to us as well! We seem to have managed to fix the problem but we're not entirely sure how / why. Our best guess is that was a software glitch with the Microhard radios themselves.

I'm documenting what we found here in case anyone else runs into a similar issue in the future.

We were able to eventually duplicate the same problem on another UAV that had previously been perfectly stable, thus eliminating the VOXL as a potential cause with two separate units showing the issue.

We were testing a variety of settings today (e.g. channel, bandwidth, power of transmitter, which module is master vs slave) just to try and identify if anything made a difference. Eventually after re-setting the settings back to the microhard defaults (which we had done several times already), the problem mysteriously stopped. We've since kept a stable link open on two UAVs for the last ~6 hours without issue, so we suspect that there was some software issue that eventually cleared when we modified the settings. The last change we made was testing which module was master/slave, and after swapping them and then swapping them back the issue went away.

Really puzzling issue, we're just glad it seems to be fixed. As I said, we suspect it was an issue with the radio and not with VOXL. Why it would be perfectly stable with one drone for hours and then have an issue with a different identical drone is beyond me.

You guys do great work, keep it up!

Ok, thanks!

Hello,

We're seeing a problem with the power module v3 and multiple VOXL Flights. We get the error "avionics power low 4.79 Volt", and have seen this on multiple power modules connected to multiple VOXL Flights and Flight Cores. We've seen voltages reported as low as 4.72, but other times it's absolutely fine without any error.

Specifically, we're using the Power Module v3 with a VOXL Flight in this case, powered by a 6S battery. It's often fine, but will randomly throw the error "avions power low".

Most recently, we swapped out the power module on this system to address it but are still getting the same error. We had also seen this same error with the same power module and a different VOXL Flight unit, so we've now seen this across two power modules and two VOXL Flights.

Any thoughts as to what's causing this? I'm skeptical multiple units could be malfunctioning, could it be a software error in PX4?

Appreciate any help on this!

@Zachary-Lowell-0 Got it working. It seems we encountered a documented bug where the defaults were somehow getting incorrectly set to the wrong parameter for RC input protocol when we reset the board to firmware defaults. We were checking the COM_RC_IN_MODE but had always had the RC_IN set to Auto previously. This made everything look fine until it glitched and changed the parameter without us knowing.

In case anyone else runs into it, here is the bug: https://github.com/PX4/PX4-Autopilot/issues/22986

Appreciate the assistance on figuring this out Zachary, we can switch over to Flight Cores and VOXL Flights for this client now which they'll be happy about.

@Alex-Kushleyev It was working on v1.11 for certain, and I recall it was working on v1.13 too, but seemed to stop working on v1.14+ from what I recall. We flashed them to different versions many times during troubleshooting and we weren't taking specific notes on which versions it was working on.

Let me know if you need us to test the specific version it breaks on.

I did more digging and it seems that the problem is related to the v1.14+ firmware I upgraded it to (from the Flight Core v2 downloads). For some reason in recent firmware updates it breaks the SBUS input.

I verified this by also upgrading a working VOXL Flight and was able to reproduce the same problem with the upgraded firmware in 1.14 and 1.15.

Any idea why this would break on the latest firmware releases?

Hello,

I'm trying to connect an SBUS receiver to a particular Flight Core v2 and it's not detecting it. The same cabling and receiver works just fine on a VOXL Flight, but this particular Flight Core v2 board won't detect it.

We haven't used SBUS with this particular board before (previously was using MAVLINK for control). We've tried the usual things like firmware updates, resetting all parameters, etc, but it won't seem to register the SBUS connection.

Is there something different with the v2 like requiring the signal to be inverted, or could there something wrong with this particular unit?

Appreciate any ideas anymore might have like a parameter that could be wrong!

Thanks!
Ansel

Anyone have any ideas here? We need to get Wifi working on this unit and are at a loss what to try when this is the only unit out of an identical batch of 7-8 that we set up with the same procedure and identical FW.

Hello,

One of our brand new VOXL Flights is having a wifi problem where it doesn't seem to be accessing the onboard wifi chip and is behaving differently than all the other identical units we've set up.

Steps
-Install system image
-Install voxl-suite
-Set up WiFi in access point mode
-Claims setup was successful, but no Wifi network is created

We then noticed there was no wifi network created so we checked and unlike every other system we've set up, this one doesn't have the second connection box for the Wifi network.


Any thoughts on how to fix this? From what we can tell VOXL doesn't seem to be communicating with the wifi chip to create the network. We've done this setup many, many times with the same procedure and firmware without issue, we're not sure what's going on.

Hey @modaltb,

Wanted to follow up again on this thread as we managed to make some progress.

We've continued troubleshooting and can conclusively say that the firmware linked to on the https://docs.modalai.com/flight-core-v2-firmware/#v1132-px4-support page does not work when flashed on our units. We finally tried downgrading to an older version of the firmware in desperation and it worked just fine. On the linked FW version the attitude estimator doesn't start up correctly which renders the controller unusable for flight. Not sure why it worked for you when you installed that version of the firmware but we were able to replicate the behavior on two separate units in our possession. Is it possible it went unnoticed that the attitude estimator was broken when you tested it on your end?

Wanted to share that insight with you and ask if there's any progress or an ETA on getting the QGC auto connection on windows fixed?

Thanks!

Will try the Pyserial on Windows on our end to see if that fixes our firmware issue, which I suspect it might given everything works fine on your end. It's a super busy week for us so will try to verify that by EOW if possible! Let me know what you figure out on the auto-connect issue!