ModalAI Forum

You can email sales@modalai.com to ask about that.

Normally our customers start with the Starling 2 Max. Once they are comfortable with how everything works they design a custom drone around the VOXL 2 board and then just buy the boards after that. Designing a custom drone is very difficult.

I would encourage you to read through the PX4 documentation to decide which failsafes are available and how you want your drone to use them. They are configurable and can be set for your preferences. I'll try to get answers for the remaining questions.

I can help with some of those questions. The VOXL 2 board runs both PX4 and ArduPilot flight controller software. So you can review the documentation for those and decide which one best fits your needs. They both have logging capabilities and both have parameters that can be used to tune the flight characteristics. VOXL 2 is the circuit board, and Starling 2 Max is our development drone that uses a VOXL 2 board.

Regarding RC receiver, yes you can fly without it. You can use a joystick via QGC instead. Or, you can just fly missions that don't require any RC input. You should be able to swap in a 2.4 GHz receiver. VOXL2 has no support for S.BUS so make sure it has a standard 4 wire UART. Just use the same port that the current ELRS receiver is connected to. You shouldn't have to change any parameters.

There's some documentation here: https://docs.px4.io/main/en/flight_modes/offboard#ros-2-offboard-control. I would review that to make sure you are following the correct procedures.

Trying to line up the correct engineer to help out with this. As a side note regarding HITL, you can also now use SIH for simulation. This is much easier to setup and in many cases just as effective as HITL. https://docs.modalai.com/px4-sih/

There are no explicit checks in the code that would limit backtrack_seconds

Thanks for reporting this! A fix is has been pushed. You can find an updated voxl-px4 package here: http://voxl-packages.modalai.com/dists/qrb5165/dev/binary-arm64/voxl-px4_1.18.0-1.0.13-202610190909_arm64.deb

voxl-mavlink-server v1.4.21 has a quick fix for this issue. http://voxl-packages.modalai.com/dists/qrb5165/dev/binary-arm64/voxl-mavlink-server_1.4.21-202610161525_arm64.deb

Thanks! Looking at some possible resolutions now.

It depends on what type of drone you are talking about. Our FPV drones, such as the Stinger, have it implemented as part of Voxl Flight Controller (VFC) in voxl-vision-hub. For development drones such as Starling it's a stand alone mode in voxl-vision-hub. In either case you have to configure voxl-vision-hub for that mode and then, yes, it's all just offboard mode in px4.

Our upcoming SDK 1.8.0 will have a release 1.18 based version of PX4. The package we are testing with can be found here: http://voxl-packages.modalai.com/dists/qrb5165/dev/binary-arm64/voxl-px4_1.18.0-1.0.9-202610051650_arm64.deb. PX4 parameters are different in this release than the 1.14 based versions so that needs to be considered. Our voxl-px4-params utility has been updated for this already and will be part of SDK 1.8.0. Directly building the tip of mainline should also work although that hasn't been tested for a few months.

It is saying that your throttle is not at lowest position. Is that the case? Can you calibrate the RC in QGC and see all of the sticks moving as expected?

It's not really a priority for us at the moment but our platform is open and you should be able to adapt Crazyswarm2 to work with PX4. But there are no plans at the moment to design a new drone specifically for that use case.

Are you using Crazyswarm2, Bitcraze’s Python Swarm API, or another framework? And which positioning system are you using?

Yes, we have tested a few USB (UVC) cameras and they can continuously live stream. So we need to figure out what is causing the problem on your setup.

Please provide a PX4 log.

Most of this can be answered by our documentation here: https://docs.modalai.com/. If after reading through that you still have any specific questions feel free to reach out here on the forum. The short answer to most of your questions is "yes".

That's kind of pointing to VLC as the issue. Can you try with QGC?