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 There is one version which is really outdated (and doesn't work on Arduino 1.0.3) available from qgroundcontrol.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)
- Is there a simple way to read optic flow data without the heartbeat stream?
- Would something related to the ArduinoMAVLink package be the optimal way to do it?
- 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