Arducopter 3.4 Mavlink connection to Basecam BGC

Navio / Edge Flight stack
1

Hi folks!
I’m currently trying to get my Navio 2 to communicate with my 32 bit Basecam BGC board via Mavlink. The gimbal board runs firmware version 2.6 and the Navio 2 runs on the latest non beta image from emlid in combination with AC 3.4.0.
On the Navio 2 I started ArduCopter with - D /dev/ttyUSB0, which should correspond to serial 2 in mission planner (I’m using an USB to serial converter, cp2104).
Then configured the speed of serial 2 to be 115 in combination with protocol 1, to match the requirements of the gimbal controller. But the controller doesn’t recognize anything… that said, with ArduCopter configured the same way on a PixRacer (but without USB to serial converter) it works just fine!
In addition I verified that the cp2104 is working correctly, since I can connect the PixRacer via telemetry to my windows PC using this adapter.
It appears as if other people had problems with this scenario recently, so maybe someone could look into this?
Would be awesome!

Thanks in advance,

finst

2

Hello, i have my basecam connected to use mavlink and everything works (i can see in basecam mavlink panel all the green connection variables).

Still have some problems on how ardupilot handles the gimbal trough mavlink, i think it is a faulty implementation from the folks at basecam. Their mavlink is still in beta. In particular we have problems with yaw axis always in follow mode and not working as it should.

Corrado

3

Thanks for your reply.
Could you tell me what you did, step by step? Maybe I can get it to work by doing exactly what you did…

Regards,
finst

4

i followed EXACTLY the basecam manual. Remember to restart ardupilot everytime you make some changes to the serials.

Remember to activate UART2 in basecam.

Corrado

5

Well, since the gimbal works with a pixracer it is obviously configured correctly. It just doesn’t work with the Navio2.
Do you use an usb to uart adapter? And what changes did you make in ArduCopter to get things working?

finst

6

After spending the whole day on this matter, I finally have something like solution:

On my Navio2 the Serial2 (D) doesn’t work at all. No matter what device (osd, gimbal, uart adapter, …) I try to connect via serial 2, it’s not happening. Every other serial works like a charm, regardless of what protocol or baudrate is being used. Strange.

EDIT: I revise my statement. The only serials working are serial 0 (A) and serial 1 ©. All other ones do not work on my Navio 2. Can someone confirm that serials apart from 0 and 1 work on their Navio 2? And why are they not working on mine? Am I doing something wrong? Please help.

7

Same thing with the raspbian beta image: Arducopter doesn’t output telemetry for options other than -A or -C.

EDIT: Guess I’ll open a new topic for this, since the Mavlink connection between Navio2 and Basecam BGC works.