I'm trying to set up the Xbee radio link to my arduplane but something is wrong. I bought the adapter boards from DIY drones when I bought the MegaPilot but bought the Xbee Pro units from Digi as I needed 868Mhz instead of 900Mhz to be licence compliant in Europe.
I used the Xctu to change the baud rate on both modules to 57600 and set up my matching VID on each. I tested with two instances of hyperterminal and no problem - radios had no problem talking to each other.
However when I put the unit in the aircraft and start it up I cannot get the APM software to connect - it just times out. I have tried master and slave mode and different modes of megapilot also.
I can see that the plane is sending data and when I look at it on hyperterminal I see a mix of giberish and also some legible text. I can see phrases and a tiny sample extract after power up looks like what I have in the attached file.
After it finishes its initial calibration it juust continuously spews giberish - perhaps this is correct but it still leaves me with the problem that I cannot connect with the APM.
Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong or what I might try.....
Also FYI I am using arduplane V2.28 and the latest version of APM 1.1.44.
Many Thanks
John
Replies
For a long time I'm trying to find someone who succed in implementing 868 interval reset procedure on APM (used in paparazzi, and even implemented in HappyKillmore's GCS ) . If it works for paparazzi I wonder why no one use it on APM?
John,
The 868 radios aren't really suitable for telemetry due to the duty cycle issue ( they only allow 6 minutes in an hour of transmission). People have tried to work around this (see this post) but most people use the 2.4 GHz radios in europe. If you google 'diydrones 868' you'll find few different post.
Paul