I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a Blue Robotics Navigator board on top. When I connect it to a PC with a UTP cable, it works perfectly.
Now I want to replace the UTP cable with a V5 telemetry radio. The telemetry radio is connected to Serial1. The “air” and “ground” modules link up, but I’m not getting any data connection. The baud rate on both sides is set to 57600. I intend to use Blue Robotics Cockpit as the software, but QGroundControl is also an option.
I suspect I’m missing something in the configuration, but I haven’t been able to find a clear guide on setting up a surface vessel.
That type of radio provides a low-bandwidth telemetry connection, which should allow for control of a surface vessel running ArduRover - however without a TCP/IP connection you will not be able to access BlueOS or use Cockpit! QGround Control should be able to receive the telemetry stream and communicate normally, although that is a fairly low baud rate you’re using.
You’ll need to configure Serial1 autopilot parameters to use that connection for control. Set SERIAL1_PROTOCOL to 1, for Mavlink1 messages. If you have issues, using Serial3 or 4 may fix things!
One thing to note - this type of radio is NOT used by the BlueBoat, which is why you may have struggled to find documentation on it! Using this radio will give better range than the WiFi system used with the BlueBoat, at least with omnidirectional antennas. However, with directional antennas at your BaseStation I would expect the performance to be comparable, with the benefit of vastly more bandwidth to the device! The soon to be released 4G USB modem for the BlueBoat will make long range communications for any surface vessel much easier, and enable Cockpit/BlueOS over this cellular network connection.