I am trying to setup a mavlink mesh with an rfd900x-US as my master and rfd900ux-US as my slaves. I can see with the RF Design tools that the master node sees all of my 5 nodes (Node IDs 2,3,4,5,6). However, when I try to connect to mission planner. I struggle to connect. If I power them all off but one, I am able to get Mission planner to connect. However, when I have two powered on, Mission Planner will only connect to one of them, and it appears to be whichever of the slaves I powered on first. I have also tried with all 5 slaves powered and this was unsuccessful.
I have put the parameters that I use below. (I could not use the exact parameters as the manual because my region locked version would not let me change S8 and S10)
I also have different SYSID_THISMAV for each slave. I have the master node plugged into the GCS.
Am I missing anything? I am also using Flow control. I have also tried to physically spread them apart. But I still struggle and have yet to get two to connect at the same time to Mission Planner or MavProxy. I have also tried setting the serial port of my flight controller to use High Latency Mavlink messages and this does not help. I also have confirmed that my baud settings for the serial port is correct at 115200 baud. I see my master has a solid green light shortly after it powers up, and when my slaves power up they are green with blinking red and my master also appears to have a blinking red along with the solid green.
It’s been a while since I have stopped working with the RFD900+ radios and the Sparkfun Surveyors, about 3 years. But I will try to help with what I can.
From what I remember, when using Mission Planner, I could not even connect to the radios. I started to think that it was a compatibility issue, since my radios were not originally built by RFDesign, it had a modded unit. Your issue with Mission Planner connecting with only one radio might be a simple software limitation. But again, I did not use Mission Planner because it was not working for my application.
One thing that would help me understand the problem. Why exactly do you need to use Mission Planner?
If you are using the radios just to collect and send data and the radios are connected to a device with serial communication available like the Sparkfun RTK Surveyors I used, you can use Python along with the pyserial library to connect to the serial device, and not the radio. And then monitor the data you need or also do algebraic operations with it.
Secondly, what equipment you have available at your place?
If you have equipment like a protoboard, voltage supply, jumper cables, you can try the following:
I remember that the radios had Tx, Rx, 5V and GND pins on the structure. You can use these pins to connect to a Sparkfun USB UART board via a protoboard. Power the protoboard with 5V using a voltage supply. Then, connect the RFDesign radio and the USB UART to the board. After that, connect the Tx pin of the radio to the Rx pin of the UART, and the Rx of the radio to the Tx pin of the UART. You then can use the USB UART board to connect to a computer. In the computer, you can pyserial as well to connect to the radio and be able to decode the data send by the radio using latin-1 or utf-8.
@matbarbosa Thank you so much for your detailed reply.
I actually was able to get it working! The true source of the problem was that I was flooding my bandwidth with mavlink messages from all my devices and that just caused the multipoint network to fail.
For those that may be stumbling on the same problem, I was able to use the mavlink inspector Mission Planner Advanced Tools — Mission Planner documentation to determine what messages were being sent and then was able to limit on the serial port of my multipoint network.
So in conclusion, if the multipoint network is not working -check to see if you are overloading it. Thanks again @matbarbosa for your suggestions and I hope that others who have the same issue I had find this post useful.
