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APM 2.5 SPI/UART Access

Posted by Andrew Barada on February 14, 2013 at 2:09pm

Hello,

I am working on developing an autonomous Quadcopter that requires an additional ArduMega Pro in order to connect obstacle avoidance and tracking sensors.  Looking at the available ports on the APM, I noticed that the SPI/UART port isn't actively used by the board while in flight, but it is used to flash the bootloader on the APM.  Does anyone know if communicating over the SPI bus could cause the board to brick or at least corrupt the bootloader?  

We are currently exploring other buses to use as communication port since we dont know the extent of damage we could cause over the SPI bus.

Also, please let me know if this is the wrong forum to post in.  This seemed to be the only APM software focused forum.


Thanks for your help,

Andrew B.

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  • Developer
    Randy February 15, 2013 at 4:17am

    Andrew,

         I believe there's two SPI buses on the APM2.x.  One is for the mpu6k and another is used for the dataflash.  Both have semaphores on them so you should be able to use them without messing up the other sensors.  I'm not fully up-to-date with how things have changed since the move to AP_HAL but my understanding is that AP_HAL includes the semaphores so it should be easier..supposedly...

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