Meghashyam's testing of BlueOS OpticalFlow

ArduCopter Copter 4.7
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@Meghashyam_Raju,

This is a new topic to investigate Meghashyam’s isssues while trying to use the new BlueOS OpticalFlow feature (blog, wiki)

Thanks for the logs, I think the core issue is on the BlueOS side but here first here are a few items on the AP side:

  1. Quite a few arming checks have been disabled. Normally it is best to determine the cause and then disable only the checks that are confirmed to be a real issue. For example, VisualOdometry is disabled. It’s probably best to keep the setup simple so I’d recommend disabling visual odometry completely (e.g. set VISO_TYPE = 0). The Rangefinder check should certainly be enabled because optical flow requires a rangefinder.
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  2. EK3_SRC2_xx is setup to use optical flow which is good but EK3_SRC2_POSZ = 2 (RangeFinder) which is almost never a good idea. The EKF should only be configured to use the rangefinder for height estimation in indoor environments with no ground clutter. Could you please set this back to the default of 1 (barometer)?
  3. Optical flow values are not regularly arriving to the autopilot, the few that do arrive are all zero. This is probably the core problem and it is probably on the BlueOS side no ArduPilot.
  4. EK3_FLOW_DELAY = 10 but the wiki suggests it should be 150.
  5. RNGFND1_MIN = 1.6 when the vehicle is on the ground. Is this correct? If “yes” then this is a very tall vehicle!

So then the question becomes, why isn’t BlueOS sending optical flow messages?

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I suspect if you keep the BlueOS’s optical flow extension open you’ll see it disappears and re-appear meaning that it’s not running reliably. It should also be possible to look at the BlueOS mavlink inspector and see that it is not reliably sending the OPTICAL_FLOW message.

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Thank you @rmackay9 for reply , as the vehicle is at some table and the range finder is facing the ground thats why the 1.6m reading might be there :grinning_face: , here in the messgaes(attached screeshot) you can see the optical flow data comes for a second and then disappears , i have closed the optical flow extension in the blue os , but this issue is still there.

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Hi @Meghashyam_Raju,

Yes, so this is the problem, the optical flow messages not arriving from BlueOS.

I think there are two possible causes:

  1. the BlueOS extension is failing for some reason. I’m not very familiar with BlueOS’s logging but it definitely has logs. Can you share the hardware being used and how you’ve configured the optical flow extension? You’re of course using the optical flow extension that I wrote?
  2. The telemetry connection between the autopilot and the companion computer does not have sufficient bandwidth. Do you know the baud rate being used? 921600 perhaps?