How to connect Icarous and MAVProxy

[FabianSchuessler]

The first picture shows the screenshot of MAVProxy running on a virtual machine which has a connection to a telemetry radio. The second picture is of the user interface of a drone which is running Icarous. Now I have this question how to make the connection between the Icarous on the drone and MAVProxy on the virtual machine.

[SweeWarman]

For running Icarous on a drone platform, assuming you want to send telemetry to the ground station over a radio (using the serial port) there are couple of things that must be done:

1. You don't have to use the -DSITL=ON flag for compilation. This is only required for connecting to the SITL simulator.

2. Specify the serial port parameters in the #else section in the intf_tbl.c file of the ardupilot app.

• (2.1) The autopilot interface is defined by apPortType and ap address. These should define the serial port on which your hardware device running icarous connects to the ardupilot (pixhawk hardware). This depends on the actual hardware you are using and you will have to figure this out. For examples, on devices such as beagle bones (https://beagleboard.org/bone), these are /dev/ttyS0, /dev/ttyS1 etc... For Nvidia Jetsons (https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/buy/jetson-tx2), they are /dev/ttyTHS0, /dev/ttyTHS1,....

• (2.2) You'll specify the serial port parameters for telemetry radio in gsPortType and gs address. Usually, if you are using a USB radio, this would be /dev/ttyUSB0,/dev/ttyUSB1,... If you are not using a USB radio, it will be similar to the serial port names specified previously (in 2.1)

#else
ArdupilotTable_t TblStruct = {
SERIAL, // apPortType
57600, // baudrate
0, // apPortin
0, // apPortout
"/dev/ttyACM0", // ap address
SERIAL, // gsPortType
57600, // baudrate
0, // gsPortin
0, // gsPortout
"/dev/ttyUSB0" // gs address
};
#endif

3. For you ground station, it seems like you are using the runGS.sh script. This script was defined only to connect to the SITL. You can launch mavproxy directly as follows:

mavproxy.py --master=/dev/ttyUSBX,brate

where "/dev/ttyUSBX" should be replaced with the name of the port on which the telemetry radio is connected on your ground station computer and the "brate" specifies the baudrate at which you are sending data. This baudrate should also be equal to the baudrate you specify on the drone in the previous section (2.2).

Hope this helps.

[aogrcs]

@FabianSchuessler Did you run ICAROUS on another board, like raspberry or beaglebones? Thanks

[FabianSchuessler]

@aogrcs Yes, it is running on Raspberry.

[aogrcs]

@FabianSchuessler I see that you use Erle Copter, and do you run ICAROUS and ArduCopter both on Raspberry?
Nice work! Thanks

[FabianSchuessler]

@aogrcs yes, both are running on the Raspberry