ModalAI Support Forum

Hi @moderator The operating range is 2-6S input VBAT. We currently have no plans for >6S at this time on the ESCs. The 40V is a part rating which gives margin for safe operating limits, transient immunity, or other electrical effects. This is documented to instill confidence in our users that we selected quality parts capable of handling various conditions outside of nominal such as back-EMF, energy dumps, incorrect wiring, or severe transients. We are keeping tabs on the trends in this market and will ascertain for future products if increased operating points are warranted broadly. I do see up to 8S is becoming more popular, but it will increase size and cost of products to enable that capability. Thanks!

@Colby-Howell New order# 8874.

Yes, you can connect to one of the UARTs on J19. However, there are only 3 UARTs so you'll have to choose which one to use. The PWM outputs on the IO expander are mainly intended to be used when you have PWM ESCs instead of a ModalAI UART based ESC. In that case you would connect to the ESC UART. If you want to use the IO expander in addition to a ModalAI UART based ESC then you will have to choose between the RC UART or the GNSS UART.

Hi @masa-chau, It seems you are on the right track. A few pointers from my side: First, what are you actually trying to achieve? If you can avoid tracking in 3D and perform the task in 2D, I would strongly recommend doing that. Recovering 3D position from 2D observations is quite hard and can be very finicky/unreliable. For many tracking tasks, you can get away with tracking entirely in image space. If you really need to track in 3D: Use the PX4 estimator output. VIO is fused into EKF2 in PX4, so I would probably use the PX4 estimated poses/velocities as the state of the drone rather than trying to fuse the raw VIO yourself. I believe these should be available in ROS 2 through voxl-microdds-agent, although someone from ModalAI should confirm the exact topics/data being exposed. Your 2D observations from the object detector are fine, but pay close attention to latency. Also, I would not expect reliable detection at very long distances with the Starling 2 Max fisheye camera; in practice, the useful detection range may be significantly below what you might initially expect. I would not rely on the ToF camera for this. For the actual tracking algorithm, I would look at an EKF or MAP estimator that fuses the 2D observations (e.g. bearing and potentially bounding-box size) with the drone's 3D pose/velocity. The important point is that a single 2D observation does not give you reliable depth. To estimate the object's distance over time, you need additional constraints, typically thr

Can you plug the cable from the working drone into the other one? That could tell you if it's the cable.