Initial beeps from BlueROV time-delayed

Blue Robotics Vehicles BlueROV2 Heavy
1

Hello,

I wonder if anyone else has this problem: We have two BlueROVs (heavy configuration) that we bought 2 years ago. In the meantime, the initial start-up tones are sometimes delayed for minutes. We get the first beeps directly after plugging in the battery. So the three phases of the motors should be detected correctly. The second beeps only occur after a certain time and sometimes do not sound completely synchronous. Nevertheless, after initialisation, we can use the ROVs as usual. I thought if there is something wrong with the input signals sent to the ESC maybe we can solve that by upgrading the BlueROV to the Flight Controller and BlueOS. Unfortunately, the problem has not changed. Any ideas for that issue?

2

Hi @Eileen27,

The second set of beeps is indicating that the ESC is receiving a valid, neutral input signal, which does not happen until the autopilot is turned on. While the Raspberry Pi is starting up the autopilot generally isn’t operating, so those beeps are a good indication of when the system is online and ready to be controlled / communicated with.

For what it’s worth, there has been some discussion on improving the BlueOS startup time, although that’s not generally an easy thing to do.

3

Hi Eliot,
thank you for your answer. As long as you don’t think this is going to be an issue, we can wait for the start up time. I was just wondering because it seemed as if this was only occurring now due to the older equipment.

4

@tony-white has mentioned that if your vehicles have Pixhawks then

It’s unclear from your initial post whether you ended up upgrading the onboard computer and flight controller, or if you’re still using the older ones.

If you’re on BlueOS and the startup time is several minutes or longer then it may be helpful if you can provide some System Logs for us to take a look at (in case there’s anything reported there that’s going wrong).

5

I upgraded one BlueROV to FlightNavigator and the Pi4, and the other one is still using the Pixhawk. I guess then there is no issue with the upgraded one - it’s just a coincidence because I didn’t know that the FlightNavigator just needs more time to boot than the Pixhawk (the startup time for BlueOS is approx. 50-60s, so this should be fine).

The ROV that still uses the Pixhawk needs about 20-30s to boot. Which is a lot more than we were used to in the beginning, so i guess this can indicate the dying hardware. Then we will also replace the Pixhawk with the FlightNavigator in the future. Thanks a lot for clarifying :slight_smile:

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