Drone Peripherals - Weber-State-UAV-Program/Documentation-2024-2025 GitHub Wiki

The drone uses several peripherals to assist in altitude measurement, and landing target detection.

Lidar

The downward facing ranger is used to estimate the drone's altitude during precision descent. It interfaces with the Orange Cube flight controller via the I2C port. This project uses the Garmin Lidar-Lite v3 as its ranger.

The wiring is given as follows:

Camera

To facilitate AprilTag detection and thus landing target aquisition, the drone uses an under-mounted downward facing camera. For this project that is the Arducam 1080p Day/Night vision Camera.

This peripheral interfaces with the on-board raspberry pi over USB. It is configured to capture images at a rate of 15fps with a resolution of 640x480.

GPS

The GPS used in this project is the Here3 GPS. It interfaces with the flight controller using the CAN protocol. Configuration of this peripheral is done within the PX4 configuration parameters, as described [here]

As configured, the GPS LED lights will blink red when pre-flight has failed. Blue when no GPS lock has been aquired but is not necessary, and solid green when a 3D lock has been aquired.