Dear DIY Drones comunity
We got a new APM 2 last week. It was working well, we were able to test it in the plane as well as XPlane simulation. Yesterday we were going to do some XPlane simulation, but it would not connect to the mission planner. We got the error "no heatbeat packets received". We attempted to reinstall the firmware but got the error "cannot detect APM version". We tried reinstalling mission planner, the APM driver, and a different computer. The same error always pops up.
We are very new at this so any help would be appreciated
Thank You
TFS Aeronautical Robotics Club
Replies
It's an Arduino so I would download the Arduino IDE, open a serial terminal and attempt to connect to see what data the board is actually putting out across the serial terminal. Worst case, somehow the code is corrupted on board, and a manual compile and flash of ardupilot may be required. Absolute worst case is that the bootloader is corrupt and Arduino IDE can flash that too with the correct programmer (AVR MK2 or other).
To recap, the 2560 has a basic bootloader firmware that requires a programmer to flash it via the 6 pin ISCP port.
If that bootloader works, then you can flash the main running ardupilot code either using avrdude and the compiled hex versions of ardupilot, or you can grab the source code, put it in Arduino IDE, and flash. The main point being the bootloader brings up the serial port active so you can flash across the usb port because we are running STK500 V2 compatible serial programming via the bootloader and the ISCP port is not required.
Again, either you have a basic serial port coms issue, or corrupted code on the board. It is recoverable in a few easy steps but may require that you have an AVR programmer handy. If you arent familiar with any of the the tools I've listed, you've got a little bit of learning curve ahead, but it's all good stuff to know and at some point, you will need to know those tools (avrdude, Arduino IDE, ISCP ports, AVR programmers). Arduino has great tutorials and a little Googling will get you everything you need.