Skip to content
What frequency are these set to? Why?
The file provided by Windracers has a .apj file extension. What does this mean and why?What is Mission Planner? What are the alternatives to Mission Planner?Do you expect the Windracers flight controller firmware to work with Mission Planner?How much memory does the Blue Cube have?Attach a screenshot of the completed firmware installation.
Lab 08 - Believer Comms and Firmware
20 Points
Last edited 25 days ago by Kyle Elliott Struck.
Set up RFD900x
902-928MHz, allows long range, high reliability telemetry communication
2. Why do the antennas need to be connected before powering?
When powered without an antenna, the radio’s power amplifier has nowhere to dissipate transmitted energy, which can cause it to overheat and become permanently damaged. The antenna provides a matched load (typically 50 Ω) so that RF energy is properly transmitted rather than reflected back into the radio circuitry.
3. What is special about the USB Serial plug?
It provides power (5v) and serial communication (Tx, Rx, GND). Internally uses FTDI or CP2102 chip to convert USB signals to TTL serial levels
4. What is pin one on the RFD900 USB Serial Connector, and what color wire connects to it? Please attach a photo before plugging it into your computer's USB.
Ground
5. What is BAUD?
speed of serial data transmission
Testing Communication
Send hello world! to your neighbor. With your ground and air unit set correctly, you can now communicate point-to-point between both modems. You will need two computers - follow the steps below for both.
Pre-built binaries that include the Ardupilot code compiled for the specific hardware. allows for easier loading via ground-station tools for autopilots, supports customization and provides a more flexible “container” format for boards with ardupilot-compatible bootloaders
Mission Planner is a ground control station (GCS) software application for ArduPilot-based autopilots. QGroundControl (cross-platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile) – supports MAVLink, ArduPilot and PX4.
APM Planner 2 – another GCS for ArduPilot, supports macOS / Linux / Windows.
MAVProxy – command-line based GCS for advanced users.
The firmware they provided uses a .apj extension, which is the ArduPilot JSON firmware format. This strongly suggests that it is an ArduPilot-compatible firmware build. Given that Mission Planner supports loading .apj files (though some versions had quirks) and is the standard GCS for ArduPilot boards. This means you can use Mission Planner with that firmware provided
flash memory 2 MB, RAM 1 MB
Problems encountered
I am not very experienced with computers, so this terminology is very foreign to me. For starters I didn’t know what BAUD was, signal speed, serial connections were. So, we basically had no idea how to set this up. We then left the RFD software open while trying to connect PuTTY and were not connecting. Finally, though, we got it!
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.