Navio2 / Mikrokopter BL-Ctrl V2 ESC Compatibility

Hi,

I’m trying to upgrade an old Mikrokopter Okto XL to Navio2+RPi3/Ardupilot as part of a masters project surrounding autonomous drones and was looking for some help interfacing the Navio2 with my existing flight controllers via I2C or PPM.

The current Octocopter system makes use of MK’s BL-Ctrl v2 ESCs which communicate with their own I2C commands or via PPM. I know the Navio2 has an I2C port and have found mention of Arducopter/Mikrokopter compatibility in some online forum posts from a few years back, alongside some sketchy C code examples from the Mikrokopter Wiki and loose documentation for Interface Protocols.

The thing is, I can’t find much by way of actual documentation on making the Navio2 output to I2C or PPM, or how to configure Arducopter to work with this.

So I was wondering if any of you guys had any experience with a similar problem, hints as to how to interface everything, or even just a recommendation for a good PPM to PWM converter?

Thanks!
Robert.

Hi,

I believe that what they mean by PPM us actually PWM (they have pwm limits in the config software), so it should be possible to directly control these.

Ok, yeah, I see what you’re talking about in the webpages I linked to, thanks.

I had though that was just some weird terminology, but I have to agree that would make a lot more sense!

I’ll give it a try and update this post with results later on.

So yeah, turns out it does work with a PWM signal. You were 100% correct.

Incidentally, it does also “work” with a PPM signal mixed together from all 8 Navio2 PWM outputs via this ppm encoder, cobbled together over a period of a month amidst deadlines and ever growing resentment. But then it has trouble with parsing the correct channels, so I wouldn’t recommend it…

1 Like