I just bought a set of parts to build my first UAV and I've been following along with the getting started guide in the WIKI. I get stuck at the point of connecting the APM 2 to the Mission Planner software. When I click the connect button, the software sits there trying to connect, but it times out.
If I open the terminal in the Mission Planner software, I can see that the APM 2 is talking but it is sending back malformed data (See attached screenshot.) I have used another terminal program to confirm data is being sent, but it is corrupted.
The first thing I did with the mission planner software was to click the hexacopter icon in the firmware tab to download the firmware. This completed and verified successfully.
I have the APM 2 plugged through usb to the computer with nothing else plugged in. I would appreciate any suggestions on how to fix this.
Edit:
This afternoon I started it up again it seems to have started properly. It does now connect to the mission planner software, although clicking connect causes the APM 2 to re-start and it has to wait a while before it goes through with the connection. Unfortunately it is still sending corrupted data back to the serial terminal.
After these issues, and especially with it randomly sometimes working or not working and restarting, I suspect a hardware problem, and I don't trust it to fly. I'm going to get in touch with the store I bought it from and see if I can get it replaced.
Replies
This morning I opened up the mission planner software and it automatically updated itself to the newest version. I went to the firmware tab and re-downloaded the hexacopter firmware. It still won't connect to the mission planner software, but is putting out a bit more on the terminal now, see attached screenshot.
On the APM 2 board, the power LED is on, and the blue 'C' led is blinking. About once every 2 seconds the blue LED stops blinking and the TX led blinks quickly a few times. This corresponds to several new lines being added to the serial terminal. The blue LED starts blinking again and the process repeats. My current theory is that it may be stuck in a re-boot loop. Is there a WDT running that could be periodically resetting the microcontroller?
I would really appreciate some help on this problem, I am not familiar enough with the software and hardware to do much debugging yet. Can anyone provide some insight on what is going wrong?
APM 2 does not connect.png