Reading serial data from PX4flow connected to Arduino Uno

First I will give a some background, and then I will describe my questions.

Setup:
I have a px4flow optical flow camera sensor connected via UART to TX/RX on an Arduino Uno board.

Current Goal:
I would like to read optical flow values calculated by the sensor on my serial monitor in the Arduino IDE.

Attempts thus far:

  • I have played around with some of the basic serial read write tutorials and it seems like everything is connected properly.
  • However, when I try to read directly off of the serial port I get a bunch of gibberish from the sensor. After reading up on the sensor and some similar types of sensors it appears that px4flow uses mavlink protocol and constantly spits out a heartbeat message over the serial. So I am assuming that the gibberish I am getting is the heartbeat message.
  • I tried playing around with this opensource sketch called ArduinoMAVLink which if nothing else has a promising name. There is one version which is really outdated (and doesn't work on Arduino 1.0.3) available from qgroundcontrol. Then there are a variety of other versions lying around which all seem to do something different. Regardless, I can't seem to get any of them to compile despite following all of the troubleshooting advise given on various forums.

Questions to the forum: ( I should note here that I am fairly new to coding so I apologize if any of these questions seem really obvious)

  1. Is there a simple way to read optic flow data without the heartbeat stream?
  2. Would something related to the ArduinoMAVLink package be the optimal way to do it?
  3. If the answer to 2 is yes, what would be a good resource to get me up to speed on some of the functions and syntax required to achieve my goal?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Julia

I trying to do same, how do you hook-up PX4flow to arduino, can you tell me which pin on PX4flow to hookup? thanks.

@webuser, the Thread you have picked on has been dormant for 2 years. I think we can safely say that nobody had an answer.

Have you a link to the datasheet for the PX4flow gadget ?

...R