Posts made by Zachary Lowell 0

@Jeremy-Frederick said in External MAVLink Connection using VOXL 2 through ttyHS1:

I'm looking to establish an external MAVLink connection to the voxl-px4 service on VOXL 2 through the ttyHS1 of the USB3 expansion board. I'm looking to integrate a third party RemoteID module, and am not implementing an external flight controller.

@Jeremy-Frederick voxl-mavlink-server is meant to act similar to mavlink-router where it can route traffic (two way comms) between a specific port or hardline. How are you connecting to your remoteID module? Over the UART I would presume as that is the only way to send those packets. If you are using the USB3.0 port instead then you will need to either edit voxl-mavlink-server or create a mavlink-router to route the traffic to that port.

A bit more information on your setup would be great!
Zach

@valvarez said in PWM Servo IO Board:

@valvarez that is correct you should power your servo from another power source capable if giving off 5V - if the servo has an operational range though of 3.3-5 then you can power it from the IO board.

Thanks
Zach

I will take a gander at this today @Mohammad-Goli and get abck with an answer - I will say the ros1 is deprecated and we tend to support or push for ros2 - does the same issue persist with ros2?

@Paul-Carff I believe the way to add channels is via the controller itself - the receiver on the VOXL2 should not require any update in config to take in more channels - from this point its configuring the controller to allow it to use more channels

Zach

@navin_kaviyarasu said in Starling2: Flight mode falls to AltitudeHold when switched to PositionHold:

Also, I don't see odometry data on mavlink console, I doubt the issue more than with the parameters!

Reply

@navin_kaviyarasu if the drone starts in position hold and then switches to altitude during the flight, it means it is losing its position during flight and falls back to the flight control that doesnt require the camera.

As for what you can do to resolve this - if you already changed the EKF2 parameters to not take into account the GPS - please proceed to calibrate the following:

1. Calibrate Tracking Camera
2. Calibrate the IMU (Via voxl-calibrate-imu and from PX4 side on QGC as well - the gyro and accel)
3. Hard reboot the drone
4. Check to ensure the exposure on the camera meets the requirements for your environment you are flying in
5. Ensure the camera is properly focused

LMK how this works!
Zach

@Shivam-Sehgal unsure what you mean by calibration files? As in files for the camera calibration? PX4 Calibration? IMU Calibration? If you specify we can further help. Also most of these parameters for the originals live on the drone under /usr/share/modalai

Zach

@henrytrinh yes this is possible with external storage - you can leverage a USB2.0 or 3.0 and connect a microsd adapter and then mount the drive.

Zach

No - tflite server runs only tflite on the GPU - you can try leveraging the Qualcomm Nueral SDK to get onnx working on the Adreno GPU, but that is a very large lift.

How far away is the gps from the 5g hat? Also have you leveraged faraday tape around the fuselage of your drone so the signal for the gps doesnt get interfered. Odds are the issue isnt from the 5g hat but from the USB3.0 port if you are leveraging. Multiple studies show there is quite a lot of interference from usb3.0 that can disrupt GPS - the solution for this is taking faraday tape and wrapping it around the right spots to cut the signal:

https://www.amazon.com/ZTTXL-Conductive-Grounding-Shielding-Interference/dp/B0CW9GL3Q9/ref=asc_df_B0CW9GL3Q9?tag=bingshoppinga-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=80676856756448&hvnetw=o&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=&hvtargid=pla-4584276320887549&psc=1&msclkid=17e3696f10bd1379a5500e2bb0278770

@Jetson-Nano if you plan on using object detection in tflite server, then you can use yolov5 or yolov8 - I am unsure if you can pipe in that data into tflite with it working as that code base is meant to ingest generic raw and nv frames (RAW8/16 or NV12/21) so streaming in a different frame format might cause issue - if this doesnt fail and it works with the pipe, then it is up to you to train your own model based on the thermal camera feed.

Why do you have it set to trajectory? If you are commanding the drone via strictly offboard commands programmatically - vision-hub should have offboard set to "off" so it isnt conflicting offboard commands with what you are feeding in.

Please do this and retest and post the results.

@Ender said in General inquiries about Starling 2 Max Outdoor GPS-denied Development Drone:

@Ender please fine responses below:

What are the specifications of the different cameras available? Thermal or RGB? Especially the tracking one.

You can find all specifications on the cameras in our documentation here: https://docs.modalai.com/image-sensors/

We have seen that the drone comes with an PX4 integrated flight controller. We would prefer working with Ardupilot. Is it possible to use an external flight controller? Or use your flight controller with Ardupilot?

Mainline ardupilot on the PCB is still in progress - unsure if it is mainlined yet but I believe this is still in development - as for using a external flight controller that can absolutely be done and then you can leverage the voxl2 for onboard compute capabilities - however you would be in charge of figuring out how to MOUNT it to the starling 2 max. Documentation on how one can leverage an external FCU can be found here: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-external-flight-controller/

If yes to the response above, could you provide indications on how to do so? What would be required (changing some parameters or something similar?)

You can follow the documentation here: https://docs.modalai.com/voxl2-external-flight-controller/ - NOTE: the documentation reflects usage of PX4, however you can use ardupilot as well with the same hardware and software setup as they both leverage mavlink.

Our environment is very bright and therefore challenging regarding camera exposure. We are thinking of using some extra cameras compared to your initial setup. How complicate would it be to add extra cameras?

The starling 2 max has the option of 3 tracking cameras - I am a bit unsure why you would need to add more into the mix in order to capture the exposure in the environment. I would not recommend adding more cameras in this ecosystem as three should be plenty.

Zach

Hi @Ender - yes the voxl 4 in 1 esc does use UART, no different naming convention, that is the protocol used.

If you wish to use PWM then you can leverage this breakout board: https://www.modalai.com/products/voxl2-io?variant=40610514206771

The board above will allow you to connect PWM esc's into this breakout board and then into the voxl2.

Zach

Hi @James-KDH - just to confirm have you installed ros2 foxy and the mpa-to-ros2 deb's on there as well? Those packages contain all the prebuilt ros2 messages that allow you to see the topics.

apt-get install voxl-ros2-foxy && apt-get install voxl-mpa-to-ros2

followed by voxl-configure-mpa-to-ros2 - then please do a reboot o nthe entire system and then check the output of the dds via ros2 topic list and if nothing is there please paste the following:

systemctl status voxl-microdds-agent and paste the output here.

Thanks!

@daniel-p-nikolov said in Issue recognizing camera MSU-0107 using M0135 dual camera board:

Tried various setups, however, it does not see any camera connected to the VOXL2.

Reply

@daniel-p-nikolov I would recommend doing a custom camera config setup. What you can do here is run voxl-configure-cameras C and then vim into /data/modalai/custom_camera_config.txt and then proceed to edit the file for this port and position - so in this case it would be

J7 lower info is hires, imx412, and false.

Then proceed to rerun voxl-configure-cameras C again and then rerun voxl-camera-server and see if cameras are detected. There could be a mismatch occuring of the port and such when using the non custom script.

Zach

@elad-applepar

1. The starling2 max comes with a GPS already attached
2. The voxl2 supports multiple methods of RC including: SPEKTRUM, CRSF_MAV, CRSF_RAW, and GHOST
3. The voxl2 and the starling 2 max already streams it high resolution camera to most GCS's through its rtsp stream - so this is a feature that is already supported on the starling2 max and voxl2's with cameras.

Zach

@jacob-yaacubov said in Mavlink server configuration of ports wont work:

branches

@jacob-yaacubov said in Mavlink server configuration of ports wont work:

both ros master run on 127.0.01 so its local ros communication looks more like mavlink issue not sure though

Reply

@jacob-yaacubov yes you need to change the mav sys id for both otherwise they will overlap and create the problem you stated before when connecting to qgc and having overlapping px4 instances. As for ROS you need to change the ROS_DOMAIN_ID (an external terminal environment variable) otherwise all the ros topics will also overlap and create multiple publishers and subscribers on the same drone when you have multiple on.

Zach

@jacob-yaacubov said in px4 params flow to autopilot:

sometimes at bootup the QGC says all parameters lost

Hi Jacob - Unsure if I am fully following but this is the explanation for how parameters work on the voxl2:

Every boot of the voxl2 kick off the px4 instance if you have that service enabled - it will then grab the parameters from /data/px4/param (if a parameter file already exists) - if you save a file from QGC of edit a parameter, from their, it will update in this file as well. As for why the parameters are lost - I am assuming what you mean is the parameter file isnt fully loaded (AKA the green bar at the top of qgc never finishes because of a timeout) - if that is the case I would recommend trying another qgc instance on a different device like a phone or different os (mac vs linux vs windows) - and see if the problem persists.

Zach

@Kiazoa-Joao replace localhost_udp_port_number witih 14551 and then restart voxl-vision-hub service via systemctl restart voxl-vision-hub - I am not super familiar with ROS1 and the availability of master IPs and ports, but I believe your ROS_MASTER_IP is correct and your ROS_IP should also be localhost as I am assuming that 192 address is the address of your parent computer.

Yep @jmltt @LR I merged in an MR this morning that will capture this error for empy not being compatible - thanks for the find @jmltt !!!