Recently purchased a QuadCopter from uDrones and been having fun putting it together and getting things to work. uDrones has been very helpful in answering all my silly and stupid questions and I'm grateful for the support. Just before the 4th of July while trying to calibrate my ESC I could not communicate via USB with my APM2. I sent uDrone an e-mail, but have not heard back. My guess is maybe they are vacation for the holiday. So I figured I'd post a request here and see if anyone might be able to help.
Here's what I've done so far in trying to fix this.
I've uninstalled everything and reinstalled, I've even tried another computer. When I plug in the USB cable it sees the APM2 in Device Manager and when I try to connect at 115200 baud rate it just times out. I can see blue lights flashing on the board, but no communication. I get the message no heartbeat found.
I even went so far as to install "arduino.exe" and download a small bit of code that flashes the board to test if I can communicate via USB and it worked. Yet when I try to run APM Planner and connect I just get a timeout.
I then tried to flash the Atmega32U2 (PPM encoder) through USB by following these instructions (http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/APM2Encoder). But it failed at step 5, it gave me an error message "AlLIBUsbDfu.dll not found."
I went to Atmel web site the makers of the FLIP program that allows you to flash the Atega32U2. There was post, that said I needed to install their USB driver to make FLIP work. Their USB drivers were located in the FLIP program folder inside the USB folder. After a couple attempts I managed to successfully install their driver and then I had a bit of a problem getting the HEX file downloaded. I tried all the files located here (http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/source/browse/#git%2FTools%2FArduPPM%2FBinaries). I must not be downloading them right, because none of them worked. I ended up using the HEX file from here (http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/downloads/detail?name=ArduPPM_v2.2.65_ATMega32U2.hex). Not sure if the version v2.2.65 is the correct file to use. The long and short of it, I was able to flash PPM encoder successfully.
Unfortunately this did not fix my problem. I tired uninstalling and reinstalling the APM Planner again, but I still can't communicate with my APM2 via the APM Planner.
Does anybody have any ideas on how I can fix this?
Thanks
Richard
Replies
I reloaded the driver http://www.ftdichip.com/Drivers/VCP.htm followed their instructions for it and everything communicates like it should. I think I yelled Eureka when COM4 showed up in APM. Good Luck!
I had what looked like a similar problem but I haven't found a solution.
I did find that I could get it to work on another computer though and it started working again on my original computer.
I got the feeling that if I powered the board externally or disconnecting the receiver and ESC's, I didn't have the problem. So it may be a problem with the USB power supply limit. If I continue to have this problem off and on I will try purchasing a USB hub with an external power supply.
Stupidity Warning: I still have a couple of deep cuts on my fingers where the quad started up while downloading some log files. So I don't recommend doing this through a ESC (yes obvious and silly thing to do).
What a timely post. I am sitting here with the same issue. Please let me know the resolution. Thanks