PX4/MAVLink Integration

Firmware/software/electronics/mechanics
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dennis
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PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by dennis »

Hi all, In our lab, we have many larger drones running on the Pixhawk platform, and I thought it would be great to have a lower cost and smaller drone that we could use to test trajectories before applying them to the more expensive and dangerous drones, and to use our space more efficiently for swarming. We chose the CF2 platform due to it's hackability and comparable specs to a full flight controller.

For interoperability between the entire code base, I recently ported over the Crazyflie 2.0 drivers to the PX4 flight stack: http://dev.px4.io/hardware-crazyflie2.html.

Incase anyone was interested, I've open sourced all the work into the main PX4 repository. Currently it has full flight functionality with support for all onboard sensors and motors. The wireless driver also retains partial support for CRTP so can fly with the mobile app. But, more importantly, it supports full MAVLink over wireless via a Crazyradio PA (it is multiplexed via a reserved CRTP port).
gwiily
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by gwiily »

It's a great work
whoenig
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by whoenig »

Great work - thank you for sharing! Do you see any changes/improvements in terms of flight performance if your run PX4 vs. the default firmware?
tobias
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by tobias »

Great work and thanks a lot for sharing! We have had the idea of doing it for a long time but never gotten to it.

As @whoenig says it would be nice to get a quick comparison.
graboosky
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by graboosky »

Hi, great idea!

One question. Can I use Crazyradio with pixhawk? I mean one Crazyradio PA on GCD and one Crazyradio PA on drone side?
kimberly
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by kimberly »

So technically with a lot of hacking, sure you can. But I wonder if that is necessary at all to honest.... You can bridge the CRTP protocol over the existing bridge that pixhawk already has for the computer. For instance, somebody did this for PRRT to act like an crtp bridge here in our library: https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-l ... n/pull/141
graboosky
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by graboosky »

And what is PRRT?
I would like to use Crazyradio with Raspberry pi as bridge so I could talk to Raspberry through wifi-MAVLink and rest comunication would be handled by Raspberry. But not sure it is way to go. What do You think?
kimberly
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Re: PX4/MAVLink Integration

Post by kimberly »

Prrt stands for: Predictably Reliable Real-time Transport, and this is a communication protocol used outside of the CF universe (https://www.nt.uni-saarland.de/project/ ... transport/).

Mavlink with crazyradio doesn't seem like a good idea... Doesn't pixhawk also have their own dongle that you can connect to your raspberry pi? The crazyradio's firmware would need to be adjusted to much in order to accommodate the MAVlink and I'm not sure its easy or even possible.

A major recommendation, is to look to the existing tools that are already implemented. The pull request that I send in a previous pose is also meant for using a raspberry pi. The communication between the rasppi and the computer is just different. Maybe start out there so that you will have a better feel of what is possible. We haven't done this ourselves with MAVlink+raspberrypi so it is difficult to help you with that.
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