Sunday, May 28, 2017

How to load Taulabs onto an Openpilot Revolution mini

While Sparky2 is probably the best go-to board for Taulabs, the Revo mini can actually be bought, since it's usually in stock...
So instead of waiting who knows how long for someone to have a Sparky2 in stock, I bought a Revo mini. If you compare the 2, you'll see that there's only minor (but still important) differences.
Revo mini schematic vs Sparky2 schematic
There's just the issue of Taulabs not detecting the board with the Openpilot bootloader. You can try and go the masochistic route, or you can actually do it the easy way.

  1. download and install both Taulabs and Librepilot groundstations.
  2. download the Linux version of Taulabs (regardless of your OS) and extract, (7zip works well) somewhere in there you'll find the bootloader *.bin file
  3. use Librepilot to:
    1. HALT the MCU and go into bootloader mode (firmware tab)
    2. !!!back up the original firmware!!!!
    3. select the proper *.bin file (only the bootloader!), tick the warning boxes and upload the bootloader. If you fuck up somehow, it should still be possible to rescue the board with the previously saved firmware.
  4. close Librepilot, open Taulabs, go to firmware tab, it should now recognize the board in bootloader mode
  5. load latest firmware release, boot the board, check if it works.
Done.