Setup Tutorial Of Telemetry Radio On Ardupilot
Step1: Connecting radio to flight controller
Connect one of the radios (LR900-F, LR24-F…) to the uart port on your flight controller, usually TELEM1/Serial1, but other idle ports can also be used.
Note that the rx of the radio needs to be connected to the controller’s tx, and tx should connect to rx.
Step2: Configuring Ardupilot
Connecting the flight controller to Windows PC via USB, open the Mission Planner and connect the flight controller.
When the radio is connected to the TELEM1/Serial1 port of the flight controller, the Serial1 parameters need to be configured as:
- SERIAL1_BAUD = 57 (57600)
- SERIAL1_PROTOCOL = 2 (MAVLink2)
Or you can configure the serial port parameter on “SETUP-SerialPorts” directly (Only available in the new version of the mission planner)
Step3: Connecting radio to PC and installing driver
Connect the other one radio to Windows PC via type-c cable. In the device manager it will show “CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller” which means that your PC has detected the drivers but note the “!” sign which indicated cp2102 drivers have not been installed.
Follow our tutorial to install the driver for CP2102.
Installation Guide for CP2102 Driver Step By Step – MicoAir Tech
After the successful installation of the driver, you can see the port numbers assigned by the CP210x device in the Device Manager, as shown in the following figure.
Step4: Connecting Ardupilot on Mission Planner over radio
Open the Mission Planner, select the correct port number in the upper right corner and click “CONNECT”.
If everything goes smoothly, the connection will be successfully established,, and the Mission Planner will start reading the controller’s parameters, which can be completed in about a few seconds.
After successful connection, click on “Link Status” in the upper right corner to check the data link quality, also you can see the data rate (should be around 1-2K/s as default) here.
FAQ
1. Slow connection speed and high latency
Usually due to the huge amount of data transmitted from flight controller exceeding the upper limit of the radio.
The max transmisstion rate of LR900-F is 2.1K Byte/s in the default mode, and up to 3.2K Byte/s in FHSS mode, and meets the requirements of most Ardupilot controller in most cases with default setup.
But some flight controllers have 3-IMU onboard, will have a larger amount of feedback data, which can lead to such situation.
You can modify a setting on the Mission Planner to solve this problem.
On the “CONFIG-Planner” page, find the telemetry rate option settings and change the Sensor option from the default value of 2 to 1 to resolve the issue.
