ModalAI Forum

Modal AI Devs, et.al.,

I'm attempting to add a sensor to the m500 system to ensure level flight of approximately 4 to 5 feet while operating. after reviewing your firmware for the flight core, I noted you have some lidar and range finding sensors.
We currently have a I2C splitter that has both the GPS and range finder attached going into port J10.
When I connect my aircraft to QGC I cannot get the range sensor to appear in the parameters or the MAVLink inspector.
reviewing your documentation on the navigation of the m500 system I saw you have GPS and visual navigation pre-configured for the system as default. can I add this range sensor to part of the default system?

Sincerely,
Steve

I have been working to get the Holy bro VL53L1X Time-of-Flight (ToF), laser-ranging sensor operational on the M500. We are currently attempting to use the J1008 port, but the QGroundControl software doesn't sense the hardware when plugged in. Any advice on how to get this working properly with your system?
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-vl53l0x-lidar.html

Regards,
Steve

@Chad-Sweet said in Running MAVSDK directly on M500 and Python update:

The Docker is 64-bit, so the code that runs inside is usually faster than the code that runs outside of the Docker

Oh, that's interesting, thanks for the insight. I'll share with the others, and let you know how it all goes.

@Alex-Kushleyev
Thanks a bunch for the quick guide we are successful in upgrading our system to the desired 3.9.15 python version.
Would we be able to follow the same steps for MAVSDK python install to M500?
We are trying to run MAVSDK python files directly in the VOXL data folder currently and receiving an invalid syntax error on the "async def run()" line. I was under the impression we had MAVSDK in the aircraft already from the functional diagram on the docs shown in the MAVSDK link.
https://docs.modalai.com/mavsdk/
Do we need to install Asyncio too to fix this error?

@Chad-Sweet
Thanks for the quick reply, our team looked into the docker examples, and know that is an option. We are looking to run MAVSDK python directly on M500's VOXL.
We'll use docker if this cannot be done, since we need the architecture bloating to stay as low as possible due to the AI.

The team and I are developing a learning AI algorithm deployed on a raspberry pi to fly an obstacle course with the M500. We are only using the Hires camera frames and aircraft position data.
We wanted to run our python code directly on your VOXL flight deck, but I'm having trouble updating the python version on the M500. Our AI is running on Ubuntu 20.04 with Python 3.9.15. Any way we can update this to something closer to 3.9?
I also am using python based MAVSDK commands from the AI to control movement through the obstacle course, do you know if we can run this directly on the system as well?
We are aware of the docker option and would just like to know if we can run on the aircraft without docker, or if we should go ahead and set up what we need to run in a docker container.
Any feedback on the two questions is appreciated!

Kind Regards,
Steve

Hello, I'm trying to configure the MAVLink on my m500 to receive MAVSDK commands from a raspberry pi I have attached to my aircraft running an AI trained to move the vehicle and identify ducks.
The aircraft will travel with a constant altitude, constant roll, and only the thrust and yaw values will change. What do you suggest would be the best method of passing MAVSDK flight
commands from the raspberry pi to the px4. The raspberry pi has a direct connection to the micro-usb port on the VOXL, and I was going to attempt to use that, but I wanted to get some suggestions first.
Any tips would be helpful, thanks!

@Cristian-Adam The aircraft (M500) still does not connect to the WiFi at my office. Modal Devs and I are assuming my problem is related to the firewall settings IT set up at my work.

Although I type the command correctly and the aircraft finds the wifi, it cannot connect and fails.

@tom Yeah I am on 0.9 platform release

Our team would greatly appreciate feedback about the motor over heating issue. Both our aircraft (two M500 platforms) have this issue. The high temperature has caused a failure and we are requesting guidance on understanding why the aircraft has this heating issue. Would a calibration of the system help fix an issue like this?

@Cristian-Adam Yes the wifi ID name I'm trying to connect to has spaces, but to get around that you can just put a underscore where the space would be.

@Adrian-Hidalgo Thank you so much Adrian!

We used voxl-docker to record hires data and position data from the aircraft and are attempting to use the data set for our project. I'll return with the result and post something short about it.

Greetings,

Two questions in reference to my M500 specifications/operation.
I was hoping to acquire the size of the stud from you that is located on the underside of the motor. The stud is used to attach the v1.1 landing gear that is a screw on threaded piece. Our team is creating a modification to the landing gear, and noticed that stud is missing from the CAD files in your protected downloads.
The Second question is to ask advice about motor operating temperatures. We flew the M500 about 12 times in the span of 3 hours, and by the end of the day on the last flight the aircraft crashed. After about 4 flights we would have to let the aircraft cool for 15 minutes, because the motors are reaching a temperature of close to 200+ degrees Fahrenheit. We are using the motors that came stock on the aircraft and the suggested 4S battery size from the modal website.
Any feed back on either of these topics would be helpful, thank you.

@tom thank you for responding to my question regarding how to setup voxl-logger, we followed your instructions and recorded some data.

I noticed that the capture rate of the sensors is extremely high (around 1000+ hertz) and the video capture rate is about 30 hertz. Is there any way that we can get these data collection rates to be more synchronized? Is there a way to limit the imu frequency to ~30 hertz?

right now we are using a command that looks something like....

voxl-logger --cam hires -i imu1

@tom How exactly would I go about doing that with voxl-logger, step-by-step?

@tom okay so following the steps here https://docs.modalai.com/voxl-vision-px4-telemetry/ I should be able to connect to the aircraft over mavlink using a docker image that is requesting information from the mavlink server. We want to pull IMU telemetry data and hires image data to train an AI with, we are then going to use said AI to re-fly the obstacle course based on our first human pilot flight. Should we be using the port 14550 or 14551 for this?

@tom the 14551 port is looking for our aircraft to run the docker, should we change that to the video port 8900?

@tom Actually, I was able to fix the problem with the voxl-streamer not running by using voxl-configure-streamer -i hires.
We are still not able to see the camera with our docker mavlink image though.
The following screen shot is what is happening...

@tom I am not able to turn on the voxl-streamer. I have it enabled, but the process will not run, any suggestions on how to unlock it?