Connecting Raspberry Pi with Pixhawk

Connecting Raspberry Pi with Pixhawk

This tutorial explains how to connect and configure a Raspberry Pi (RPi) so that it is able to communicate with a flight controller using the MAVLink protocol over a serial connection. This can be used to perform additional tasks such as image recognition. HERE you can find general instructions for setting up the Raspberry Pi.

Required parts:
1 x Pixhawk 2.4.8 (or similar)
1 x Raspberry Pi (min. Version 3)

Hardware Setup

Connect the flight controller’s TELEM2 port to the RPi’s Ground, TX and RX pins as shown in the image below.

Pinout:
Pixhawk Telem 2 Tx  -> Raspberry Pi GPIO 14 (TXD)
Pixhawk Telem 2 Rx  -> Raspberry Pi GPIO 15 (RXD)
Pixhawk Telem 2 GND -> Raspberry Pi GND

Enable MAVLINK 2 on Serial

Connect the Pixhawk to a computer and start the Mission Planner software. Search for the following settings (Mission Planner / Config / Full Parameter Tree) and adjust the values if necessary:

[SERIAL2_PROTOCOL] = 2 to enable MAVLink 2 on the serial port.
[SERIAL2_BAUD] = 921 so the flight controller can communicate at 921600 baud.

Configure the serial port (UART)

Start the RPi config tool:

sudo raspi-config    

When prompted, select to “Would you like a login shell to be accessible over serial?”.
When prompted, select to “Would you like the serial port hardware to be enabled?”.
Reboot the Raspberry Pi when you are done.
The Raspberry Pi’s serial port will now be usable on /dev/serial0.

Software Setup

Run the following commands in RPi terminal to set up MAVProxy:

sudo apt-get install python-pip
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev
pip install dronekit
pip install dronekit-sitl
pip install MAVProxy

Enter the following command to test the communication:

mavproxy.py --master=/dev/serial0 --baudrate 921600