Discussions

Comm problems seem to be drawn to me.  This time it appears to be an issue with comm between the GPS and the APM.  I reliably get a solid blue light on the MediaTek, indicating GPS lock I believe, but the red LED (C) on the APM doesn't light up.  I'm running the ArduPiratesNG release 458 (latest one available for download on their wiki).  Best I can tell, there's no way to know what firmware is loaded on the GPS, but I see the same behavior if I configure for 1.4 or 1.6.

My first thought was that it's a GPS firmware problem and I need to reload the firmware as instructed on the wiki (gotta buy a friggin' FTDI cable, ARGH).  But then I saw this post, which led me to believe that there might be some versions of the code floating around where LED C isn't functioning correctly???

I've also read multiple insinuations that there's some way to test the GPS via CLI, but I can't find instructions on how to do so for the life of me.  Then I found this post on RCG and ran knuckles' code, whose result was a bunch of gibberish on the serial monitor.  Here's a sample:

Ö f¡ÎÐÝ âá´ûùz_M × ~±§ÐÝ âá´ûùz_M Ø ©"ÐÝ âß´ûùz_M Ù ~¢ÝÐÝ âß´ûùz_M Ú ÐÝ âß´ûùz_M Û ÐÝ âß´ûùz_M zÜ fz<ÐÝ âÞ´ûùz_M tÝ fuÐÝ âÞ´ûùz_M nÞ fq

And as a longshot, per this post, I've hit the reset button after getting a lock while configured for both 1.4 and 1.6 ... with no luck.

Any ideas?

... I think my head is going to explode :) ...