Thursday, May 25, 2017

dRonin communication to secondary board via UDP (USB EEM)

There is a similar project, called FlyingPI, but instead of using Raspberry PI, this project is using the OrangePI (Zero)/(Zero plus2) 

The interface between the micro-controller and flight controller will be USB (Full-Speed).  (Soon there will be STM32 high speed USB  boards out, but as of now, it is USB Full Speed).  The protocol will be EEM-USB (Ethernet-Emulation-Model), it is simple, just two bulk end-points.  At this time I have a basic STM class driver setup and some what talking to Linux.   An Ethernet interface is created and DHCP messages are streaming from the Linux. So, at-least the USB descriptors are working etc.

Why use USB?  Why use Ethernet? The goal is to make the flight controller interface generic, i.e UDP This way different boards or platforms can use standard sockets instead of SPI, Serial, etc. 

The main issue at this time is RAM space the board only has 138K of RAM, so, buffer space will be limited, but, should work.

Moving forward...

Saturday, May 20, 2017

orangePI Zero dRonin

I've been making slow progress on getting dRonin running on the orangePI Zero; work, and other spring outside activities.

Status:
Sparkfun MPU9250 and MS5611 is connected to the zero and dRonin is loading on the board.  just debugging general start up issues and now getting to testing sensors.  Need to configure starting dRonin with command line options for SPI and I2C.  Once this is done, add the microcontroller board for motor control, pwm input, etc.  Making progress.