Get optical flow Sensor Data without flight controller

Heyho,

I want to use a optical flow sensor for a project and found the Ark Flow Sensor to be a suitable option, as you guys use it for more sophisticated usecases than I do.
As I don’t want to build a drone I don’t have any use of a flight controller.

I tried reading out raw can Data from the Sensor running the latest px4 firmware with a usb2can adapter but it seems like it needs to be initialized first by the flight controller.

Is there a way to inititalize the sensor on my computer or with a RPi to make it send the data it generates?

The project is also rather large so I have some difficulties navigating the code. where do I find what sources get built when I build a certain firmware with the “make” command?

Thank you

You can use pydronecan to enumerate and boot the ARK Flow then get the optical flow data.