ardupilot/Tools/AP_Periph

AP_Periph UAVCAN Peripheral Firmware

This is an ArduPilot based UAVCAN peripheral firmware. This firmware takes advantage of the wide range of sensor drivers in ArduPilot to make building a UAVCAN peripheral firmware easy.

The AP_Periph firmware is based on the same ChibiOS hwdef.dat system that is used to define pinouts for STM32 based flight controllers supported by ArduPilot. That means you can add support for a new UAVCAN peripheral based on the STM32 by just writing a simple hwdef.dat that defines the pinout of your device.

Currently we have four targets building for AP_Periph firmwares:

• A STM32F103 128k flash part made by mRobotics (target f103-GPS)
• A STM32F412 512k flash part made by CUAV (target CUAV_GPS)
• A STM32F105 256k flash part (used in ZubaxGNSSv2)
• A STM32F303 256k flash part made by mRobotics (target f303-GPS)

More can be added using the hwdef.dat system

Features

The AP_Periph firmware can be configured to enable a wide range of UAVCAN sensor types. Support is included for:

• GPS modules (including RTK GPS)
• Magnetometers (SPI or I2C)
• Barometers (SPI or I2C)
• Airspeed sensors (I2C)
• Rangefinders (UART or I2C)
• ADSB (Ping ADSB receiver on UART)
• LEDs (GPIO, I2C or WS2812 serial)
• Safety LED and Safety Switch
• Buzzer (tonealarm or simple GPIO)

An AP_Periph UAVCAN firmware supports these UAVCAN features:

• dynamic or static CAN node allocation
• firmware upload
• automatically generated bootloader
• parameter storage in flash
• easy bootloader update
• high resiliance features using watchdog, CRC and board checks
• firmware update via MissionPlanner or uavcan-gui-tool

Building

Using f103-GPS as an example, build the main firmware like this:

• ./waf configure --board f103-GPS
• ./waf AP_Periph

that will build a file build/f103-GPS/bin/AP_Periph.bin. You can now load that using the CAN bootloader and either uavcan_gui_tool or MissionPlanner SLCAN support.

Flashing

To load directly with a stlink-v2, do this:

• st-flash write build/f103-GPS/bin/AP_Periph.bin 0x8006400

for the CUAV_GPS which loads at offset 0x10000 use this:

• st-flash write build/CUAV_GPS/bin/AP_Periph.bin 0x8010000

Flashing bootloader

To flash the bootloader use this:

• st-flash write Tools/bootloaders/f103-GPS_bl.bin 0x8000000

Building bootloader

To build the bootloader use this:

• Tools/scripts/build_bootloader.py f103-GPS

the resulting bootloader will be in Tools/bootloaders

Firmware Builds

Firmware targets are automatically built and distributed on the ArduPilot firmware server on firmware.ardupilot.org. These firmwares can be loaded using Mission Planner or the UAVCAN GUI Tool. Parameters for peripherals can be changed using the Mission Planner SLCAN support or using UAVCAN GUI Tools.

User Bootloader Update

The bootloader is automatically stored in ROMFS in the main firmware. End users can update the bootloader by setting the UAVCAN parameter "FLASH_BOOTLOADER" to 1. After setting it to 1 the node will respond with a debug text message which can be seen in the UAVCAN GUI tool to show the result of the flash.

Discussion and Feedback

Please join the discussions at these locations:

• https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/ap-periph-1-0-0-stable-released/49049
• https://gitter.im/ArduPilot/CANBUS