Lost heartbeat when uploading firmware from bin folder

Blue Robotics Software ArduSub
1

I’ve been able to successfully flash the firmware through BlueOS when I download it directly from ArduPilots website. After doing that I can see all of the sensor data, a consistent heartbeat, and I’m able to connect to QGC no problem.

However, I need to build a custom frame config so I followed these steps from Ardupilot.

Before making any modifications to the 6DOF file I wanted to compile everything and make sure I could flash the basic firmware onto the navigator. Once built and flashed onto the navigator, it should operate exactly the same as the executable I downloaded straight from their website. I ran the following commands:

./waf configure --board navigator
./waf sub

The build file was located where it was supposed to be, I tried to flash it to the board and everything fails. Heartbeat is gone, cannot connect to QGC or view any of the parameters I was previously able to on the BlueOS software.

I can reflash the original firmware and it works just fine. The only difference I can see is that the original is 2.1 MB and the one that I built is 2.4 MB. I’m assuming the source code is nearly the same on the executable I downloaded from the website, but I don’t know what is different with mine. I have gone down many rabbit holes trying to figure out what is going wrong but I’ve been stuck on this for about a week now and I’m not sure where to go from here.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

2

Hi @margo ,
Are there any warnings or errors during the build process with ./waf configure --board navigator and ./waf sub?
You’ll need to rebuild the firmware specifically for Navigator using specific toolchain version. rebuild navigator firmware To set up the specific toolchain before building the firmware, use the --toolchain argument with waf.

./waf configure --board Navigator --toolchain /opt/gcc-arm-9.2-2019.12-x86_64-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabihf

your can download the toolchain from arm toolchain 9.2-2019.12

3

Thanks for such a quick response! I downloaded the toolchain but I did not specify it on the ./waf command, so this was the source of all my problems. I was able to successfully compile and flash it onto the board, and everything seems to be working great. Heartbeat is still going strong! Thank you so much for helping, I really appreciate it.

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