I am attempting to connect a stand alone Navigator with Rover FW (4.4.0) to a base station using serial radios (RFD 900x). I have the radios configured correctly as I can communicate between the radios using the RFD Tools application. I can also communicate to a pixhawk cube black using this pair of radios. I have tried to use serial 1 and serial 4 ports on the Navigator but they will not connect in MP or in QGC. Has anyone else tried to connect to a Navigator using a serial radio system?
Here are the serial settings from the Navigator that are an exact replica of the settings for the serial port on the Pixhawk. Not sure why it is not connected as the radios are flashing showing that they are connected.
I’ve done this before. I don’t recall the exact settings though, but it worked.
Have you double-checked that the ports are assigned to Ardupilot in the Firmware page?
This is the default config:
Thanks Eliot, I had not seen that post. I know the radios are setup to communicate, and they can do so using the RFD tools, and on a Pixhawk cube black. Regarding the other thread, I do not want to use serial 5 as that is configured for a GPS. I have tried on Serial 1 and Serial 4 using the same settings. I have also tried to change the protocol to RCIN, but for other ardupilot based boards, the MAVLink2 is the correct parameter for these radios. I have nothing plugged into RC port as I plan to use a joystick for control. I have also powered the radio directly off the Serial port, and powered it using its own 5 V BEC with no connection in MP or QGC.
Greetings all…back to my personal blog…lol. So I think I found out the problem. When I was trying to connect the RFD radios I kept the Navigator plugged into a switch connected to one computer, so I could easily log in and change parameters as necessary. When I disconnected the Navigator from the switch (remove ethernet cable), the radios connected and I could connect to the Navigator through the radios on a separate computer. So if you want to use a different radio, you will need to disconnect the ethernet port on the Navigator or disable this for communication. Thanks again to Willian and Elliot for their assistance.
That’s not a behaviour I was aware of, so I’ve asked about it internally, and if it’s expected we’ll add it as a troubleshooting recommendation on the Navigator product page, but otherwise we can hopefully look into why that’s happening and fix it (perhaps it’s some kind of BlueOS or ArduSub configuration issue).
Greetings Elliot…here is todays update. I tried to connect again with the RFD’s using telem port 4 on the Navigator, and it would not connect in MP or QGC. I turned everything off and connected it to telem port 1 on the Navigator and got a connection in MP and QGC. I rebooted everything several times and consitantly got connection using telem1 port. Just for checking went back to telem4 and would not connect. Telem1 and 4 are configured with the exact same parameters, so I have no idea what could be the problem.
To test Elliots comment, I then connected the Navigator to the switch via ethernet, and the RFD in serial 1 and I can get a connection. I repeated this several times to ensure that it worked consistently. I would say the problems that I encountered yesterday were with the different telem ports on the Navigator and connecting the ethernet on the Navigator does not affect the RFD connection.
OH I have an idea of a possible issue. what baudrate are you using between flight controller and radio?
We have an issue where the ping service is changing the baudrate for other ports. I wonder if that is the case here. It probes the ports at 115200, so if you setup SERIAL4 to a different baudrate, it might be getting changed.
Interesting Willian, I was using baud rate of 57600 for the RFD radios that I manually set in BlueOS for both serial ports 1 and 4. It works great in serial 1, but no communication in 4.
can you try using 115200 on the radios? if that fixes the issues, then it is because of this issue.
It will probably get merged in a few days.
you can also find a “bridges_update” image in version chooser if you put “williangalvani/blueos-core” as the repository
Anything for you Willian…So I changed the baud rate on both radios to 115200, and I can connect via MP and QGC in Serial 4 on the Navigator even when I have manually changed the baud rate of this serial port in BlueOS to 57600. So it looks like Serial 4 is defaulting to 115200 regardless of what is set for the parameter.
