Posts made by Thomas MacNamara

Hi Vinny,

Thank you for such a detailed set of answers!

In response to your points:

1. We will just make a super short connector between the daughterboard and J1. I did like the elegance of a single board that snapped on and did everything we wanted but this really won't add much to the footprint. We are running 12v passive power over ethernet so we will make sure that per the docs there is a nice supply of 5v 6a for the j1 port.
2. Yep just making sure, this will be shunted strait into a usb-to-ethernet setup (based on the rtl8153-cg chip), depending on how annoying the GPIO stuff might be we did think about simply putting a tiny powered usb hub onto the daughterboard and breaking out a usb connection in order to do those tasks (a little more effort to implement but more flexibility)
3. Ooof that is a bit of a minefield isn't it? The BLSPs do look to be the best choice if we go with the GPIO idea.
4. In light of this it might not be that bad an idea to go with the USB microhub idea, that way it would not be hard to implement another discreet microcontroller to deal with any realtime/gpio tasks and simply package that up into a nice neat message to pass upstream.

We will do a bit of planning and let you know where we got to.

Regards,
Thomas

Hi, I have a few questions regarding some of the pins on the B2B connector.

1. Pins 2, 4 and 6 are listed as VDCIN_5V_CONN, does that mean we could use these pins to power the VOXL
2. Are pins 12 and 14 the minus and plus signals respectively for the USB2 port
3. We would like to be able to break out some of the GPIO is there any of the listed ports that would be better to use then others?
4. Are the UART and i2C ports in the VOXL ecosystem? The documentation tends not to mention j13.

I realize questions 3 and 4 are very realated to https://forum.modalai.com/topic/635/voxl-b2b-port-connections-questions?_=1644888153272 but I thought I would clarify how we would be using them if that made any difference. They would be only for VERY simple things like communicating with arduino like devices or reading pots.

There seems to be more detailed documentation for the Snapdragon Flight here:
https://developer.qualcomm.com/qfile/33889/snapdragonflight_b2b_user_guide_v2_feb2017.pdf

But I don't want to design a whole PCB on an assumption that the implementations are the same.

Background: We are designing an all in one power-over-ethernet, usb to ethernet and voltage regulator daughterboard in order to keep the footprint of the VOXL small when running of a passive POE connection. (underwater means that the less cables the better and completely rules out running off the wireless)

Thanks and sorry once again for asking weird questions for our weird usecase

After no small amount of playing around and Googling I think I have hit the wall.

If I set them as = y then the build won't boot when deployed through fastboot if I set them as =m then they just stay as unset

# CONFIG_USB_CONFIGFS is not set
# CONFIG_USB_GADGETFS is not set

I did check to see if the WIFI was running on the failed boots just incase the change was breaking ADB but it seems the build just does not like those flags.

It is so frustrating to know the hardware is there and the implementation is possible (Rasberry-pi HID is pritty dang easy).
Especially seeing as the underwater stuff is working.

The non USB solution is just to go via ethernet but that is just a lot of things being bolted on to the poor thing.

Thanks for the help though.

Quick update, yeah it totally works

Hey just a quick clarification on the steps on https://docs.modalai.com/camera-imu-coordinate-frames/

Does changing the extrinsics via voxl-configure-extrinsics have the same effect or are theses two systems separate?

Sorry for the lag here, it took a while to get everything building (and we had a COVID lockdown as well (Australia (Queensland (It worked, no local covid) ) ) )

I have been poking around in the build scripts but to be honest this is massively out of my wheelhouse, I'm primarily a VR and Robotics developer not a Linux wizard.

I just can't quite work out where i would need to add the flags to have GADGETFS and the HID GADGET stuff compiled into the image.

I have tryied a few time but to be honist the whole build pipeline is systems built upon systems and the main documentation for Linux is just "use menuconfig and type make and WHABAM you get Linux"

I know this usecase is WAY outside the norm but i figured I would at least ask

I can confirm it does work now.

Also not sure if it helps but after running through this about 10 times I got tired of copy and pasting the steps from the docs and modified the last line of the docker.run

-w /home/user ${optImg} /bin/bash -c "echo doing the first steps from the docs ; cd $optDir ; sudo -S <<< "user" chown user . ; rm -rfv $optDir ; echo user; source /home/user/build.sh $optDir; $SHELL"

This just does the rest of the steps at once and starts building

I am sure most people wouldn't need it but i might be useful for someone

Hi, I am trying to build the Docker Image as per the instructions in the gitlab readme
https://gitlab.com/voxl-public/system-image-build/voxl-build

On the step

docker build -t voxl-build -f ubuntu-xenial.Dockerfile .

I get the following error:

Collecting pip
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/f7/ce/e359cf283c0c0f2e0af7df8f16c8d79047aa1887a00a5b39b27d8afc49e2/pip-21.2.1.tar.gz (1.6MB)
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-build-1qzqBH/pip/setup.py", line 7
        def read(rel_path: str) -> str:
                         ^
    SyntaxError: invalid syntax
    
    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-build-1qzqBH/pip/
You are using pip version 8.1.1, however version 21.2.1 is available.
You should consider upgrading via the 'pip install --upgrade pip' command.
The command '/bin/sh -c apt-get update    && apt-get -y --quiet --no-install-recommends install       gcc-4.8-multilib       g++-4.8-multilib       gawk       wget       git-core       diffstat       unzip       texinfo       gcc-multilib       build-essential       chrpath       bzip2       zip       cpio       bc       make       autoconf       automake       libtool       wget       curl       sudo       libxml-simple-perl       doxygen       qemu-user-static       android-tools-fsutils       debootstrap       schroot       vim       less       iputils-ping       python       python3.6       python-pip       python-setuptools       python-tk       openssh-server    && apt-get clean autoclean    && pip install --upgrade pip    && curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo-1 > /usr/bin/repo    && chmod a+x /usr/bin/repo    && echo "dash dash/sh boolean false" | debconf-set-selections    && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive dpkg-reconfigure dash' returned a non-zero code: 1

I have gotten this error in Ubuntu 20 and a clean install of Ubuntu 18

This is with a fresh pull from the repo

@modaltb I will have a look now.

Hi thanks for your help with that.

Just a note: I love this thing, it is going to save me months of development time. What you all have done here is amazing.

But, please could you at least put some We are messing with this code at the moment or some Deprecated warnings in your documentation.

This is the third rabbit-hole I have gone down just to find out that the code does not exist or has been refactored.

Part of the issue is I am trying not to be too much of a pain asking questions and i assume that often it is an issue on my side so by the time I have posted I am already a day into hitting my head against a wall.

I am having a few issues running the camera calibration on the VOXL
I am following the steps in https://docs.modalai.com/calibrate-cameras/

When I try to run any of the voxl_cam_ros features I get the following error

yocto:/$ roslaunch voxl_cam_ros tracking_slave.launch
[tracking_slave.launch] is neither a launch file in package [voxl_cam_ros] nor is [voxl_cam_ros] a launch file name
The traceback for the exception was written to the log file

Here is my current installed packages

yocto:/$ opkg list-installed | grep "voxl"
libvoxl_cutils - 0.0.2
libvoxl_io - 0.5.4
voxl-camera-server - 0.7.1
voxl-cpu-monitor - 0.1.7
voxl-dfs-server - 0.2.0
voxl-docker-support - 1.1.3
voxl-gphoto2 - 0.0.5
voxl-imu-server - 0.8.1
voxl-mavlink - 0.0.2
voxl-modem - 0.12.0
voxl-mpa-tools - 0.2.6
voxl-nodes - 0.1.7
voxl-qvio-server - 0.3.1
voxl-streamer - 0.2.3
voxl-suite - 0.4.6
voxl-tag-detector - 0.0.2
voxl-tflite - 0.0.1
voxl-tflite-server - 0.1.1
voxl-utils - 0.7.1
voxl-vision-px4 - 0.9.2
voxl-vpn - 0.0.3

I assume I am missing something but I have read through the documentation a few times to try and work out what I have done wrong

Thanks mate that would be greatly appreciated!

I am trying to get the VOXL dev board to act as a HID device.

I am trying to use the USB gadget feature of ConfigFS.

As far as I can tell it doesn't look like the yocto build has this compiled in the Kernel.

I was just wondering if I have missed something or I should look into the VOXL Open Source Kernel Build

Yeah that's what I thought, but it seemed suspicious, too good to be true.
Everything I needed in a small package, nope there has to be a catch.

Thanks for sanity testing this, I will jump back through the docs and order a few boards

@Chad-Sweet said in Sanity test for unusual use-case:

block diagram

Ok here is a high level Block Diagram, teensy is there mostly because I am not super sure if the VOXL GPIO is going to be fast enough to do what I need, although that might be just because I misread the docs.

@Chad-Sweet said in Sanity test for unusual use-case:

block diagram

Yep sure let me whip one up for you in the meantime here is a concept render for when we were working out the scale of the enclosure.

Hi, I am designing a low latency accurate (mm or sub-mm) underwater tracking system.

I have a brute force solution working but I am at the stage of miniaturization and since each tracked object would need it's own tracking device the VOXL board is very attractive.

From my understanding the VOXL board might be more or less what I need, especially with all the customization options you have built.

I know ill need to work out coms and recalibrate the cameras for underwater optics and I would be using my own localization system that works well in openMV and openCV but frankly I'd rather not mess with the dead reckoning you have done here.

I have done a fair bit of digging around your docs and I don't think it should be impossible but I figured I would ask before spending the next little while coding myself into a pit of despair.

I know it is a weird use-case, I'm happy to answer any questions you have.