OmnibusF4 bootloader not responding

PX4 Autopilot Flight Controllers đź’»
1

Hello All,

I am new to the Dronecode community, and I am very impressed by what has been done so far: Excellent Work!
I have bought a Omnibus F4 V3 and flashed the bootloader as detailed in the associated guideline.
I have then built the firmware and tried to upload it without any success so far…
I got an error message “Loaded firmware for board id:42,0 size: 994829 bytes (96.38%), waiting for the bootloader…” then I got “write timeout” errors
I have tried to use QGroundControl to upload the firmware but I also get a “board is not responding error”.
I use Ubuntu 16.04 on a Virtual Machine but I also get the same error when I use QGroundControl on Mac OsX.

I have searched for Omnibus F4 issues but I could not find a similar issue.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Corentin

2

I have both Bootloader and Firmware repos on my machine and after building the bootloader I go to the Firmware directory. Thhen, after verifying I see the device show up when plugged into USB, I use these:
Unplug, push/hold reset button on omnibusF4 and plug into USB

dfu-util -a 0 --dfuse-address 0x08000000 -D …/Bootloader/build/omnibusf4sd_bl/omnibusf4sd_bl.bin
make -j1 omnibus_f4sd upload

3

Hi @CorentinD

Do you have another board, such as a Pixhawk that you could compare against? Maybe there’s a problem with the USB cable or the VM?
In general, there are different Omnibus board variations, and PX4 has only been tested on a few of them (the ones on the documentation). So it’s possible that there is indeed a problem with your board.
Another important thing to know is that we recently had a breaking change for the Omnibus board, so make sure to use latest master for both the Bootloader and the Firmware. The changes are here:

4

Hi @dlarue and @bkueng,

Thank you for your answer.
I think that the problem is coming from the Virtual Machine thing…
I will install the Px4 dev env. on Mac OSX and give it a try.
Will post about it when I will find time to give it a try :slight_smile:

Regards,
Corentin

5

Hi @CorentinD

I am experiencing a very similar issue to you with an Airbot Omnibus F4 Pro V3 SD.

Have you had any success finding a solution?

QGroundControl crashes or sends the following error when attempting to flash the flight controller:

Found device: PX4 FMU V2
Error: Sync: Send Command: Get Command Response: Timeout waiting for bytes to be available
Upgrade cancelled

6

@AuThomasPrime, I have tried several things without findind any solution… Might be an hardware issue.

7

In the meantime (PX4 V1.11) many non OB F4 HW targets run perfectly with the PX4 OB F4 code, as soon as a F405 (1M flash) is installed as MCU.
The flash process then is practically no longer dependent on the hardware because the virtual USB of the MCU is used in DFU mode.
Only about the breakouts (when the codeflash was successful) you have to pay attention to the PINs of GPS RC and telemetry.
One small thing to note is that QGC currently cannot flash any of the targets even the officially tested ones.
Every flash process of OB F4 must be done without QGC depending on the platform. QGC must not be open! And flashing from a virtual machine mostly does not work, because the timing of flashing is very sensitive and e.g. VM Ware / Virt Box and Parallels behave very differently.