(Multiple) Solo(s) as client(s) on wifi network

I just bought two Solos and it seems I miscalculated a couple of things.
First, it seems that while you can change the name of the WiFi network (and corresponding password) it’s not actually the network for the Solo vehicle but the network for the Solo controller (from Connect Solo to internet in dev guide). The drone and controller still communicate through the “SoloLink” – a dedicated network as I understand it – and the controller forwards mavlink traffic. It’s an issue for my application as I would eventually want to operate the Solos autonomously, aka without the controller, but I wouldn’t be able to have the vehicles connect to my network directly without having the controllers. Is there any way to have the Solo be a client of my network directly?

Second, for multiple vehicle support, it seems that the Parameter SYSID_THISMAV is hardcoded into the controller software/firmware and that modifying it into the FC results in the controller not being able to talk to the vehicle. Any way to go about that ?

If I’m misunderstanding any of that – happy to be corrected :slight_smile: Thanks for any insight !

@Pedals2Paddles

@mtbsteve do you know a way we would achieve this? or at least have multiple controllers connected on the same network. Since we have to connect to the sololink network to connect to mission planner we are limited by connecting 1 drone at a time. We tried to follow this documentation from https://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/swarming-with-solos-and-ros posted by @Chris_Anderson and this and it seems like we are able to connect to our network but the port forwarding is not happening. I don’t know if we are missing an important step. But when we run ifconfig if we ssh into the artoo we see our wlan0 network. I am able to ssh into it using the wlan0 ip from our network as well but I am not able to connect to it through mission planner via UDP. I am able to connect to it only if im connected to the sololink network. Our way around this was to use the Rpi and connect to serial2 but it seems like an over kill since the IMX companion computer would do pretty much all we need.
As @loicspace mentioned we have two solo’s and we want to find a way to control them together autonomously before we buy more (many more) @Chris_Anderson would you have any insights on this?
Any help would be appreciated :slight_smile:

Thanks

Sorry but I have no experience with port forwarding.
I would solve this differently anyway.

  1. Keep each Solo’s connection to their respective controller.
  2. Hook up a RPI with every Solo via Serial and Mavlink.
  3. Connect the Solo-RPI’s to a GCS, eg running on another RPI via the RPI wifi network, independent from Sololink.
  4. Now write some code on the GCS which allows you to connect, launch and control the Solos by sending the commands to the respective airborne RPIs who in turn send the commands via mavlink to their Solo flight controller

You still have each Solo bound to their respective controller, and you can manually override if something goes wrong.

@mtbsteve Yes that’s our current set up – which is also how we had our two Iris+ set up :slight_smile:

The downside in the case of the solos is that we then don’t take advantage of the IMX onboard computer and we also loose the built-in video link from the gimbal to stream the GoPro over the network.

Any idea about the other issue with the SYSID_THISMAV?

Thanks so much for your insights!

So when it’s hardcoded in Artoo then you need to change the code to the settings you need and recompile.

Yes I expected as much, are there any plans thru Open Solo to remedy that ?
I think all can agree that having to change code and recompile for each vehicle to change an ArduPilot Parameter – one as crucial as this one – is rather tedious. It’s rather odd that 3DR did not bake that capability into the original app.

I just bought one more Solo, so I guess for now we’ll have to go the edit and compile route.

Cheers

So I know this is old but I had the same issue. I changed the SYSID_THISMAV on the solo, lost the ability to use the controller but QGroundControl is still able to communicate with the aircraft. As it was stated before the controller is hard coded to only talk to ID #1, but once the Solo is linked to the controllers WiFi any GCS can communicate with it. Also it looks like QGC can have a USB controller plugged in so that might be a way to have a backup manual option if needed. I still need to test that out.