I’m using a Cube Red and trying to flash ArduPilot firmwares onto both FMUs via Mission Planner.
The primary FMU (main node) flashes successfully without any problems.
However, when I attempt to flash the secondary FMU, Mission Planner shows an error saying “board not detected.”
Despite this, both COM ports appear in the device manager. And both show the primary firmware version on Mission Planner,
which suggests that the board is being detected — just not by the secondary FMU flashing process.
I’ve double-checked connections and drivers, and I’m using the official ArduPilot firmware files (stable release).
@tridge
Has anyone else run into this issue or found a workaround to properly flash the secondary FMU on Cube Red?
Any insights or steps to troubleshoot this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
I can’t help specifically with your issue, and I suspect it may be a little hard to track down, as there aren’t many Cube Red autopilots in user hands.
However, it’s critical that you read this “do not fly” service bulletin:
I had luck with switching between the on-cube USB-C and the breakout usb port.
Details are a little fuzzy as I don’t have the hardware in my hands at the moment, but I found that if I chose “force bootloader”, I was able to manually choose the secondary firmware in the list of firmware options and bring the board back. I think I had to play games by forcing bootloader and then reconnecting the flight controller, and switching usb ports. I think you may also need to “flash bootloader” once you get one of the cores online.
By default, the secondary core will be configured with a mavlink systemid of 2. During some debugging games I was playing, I found that I had somehow changed this to 1, and when I got both cores flashed properly, I could only see the first in mission planner (since normally after connecting you would be able to see multiple mavlink systems in the dropdown in the upper right). Since I had made them both system id 1, they looked the same to mission planner, making me think that the secondary processor was not working, so don’t fall into that trap.