Need to debug your robot or drone? In a HSLU university research project, Erich Styger is using a Pixhawk and PX4 based drone hardware. Pixhawk and PX4 is an open standard for drone hardware and firmware. It is mainly used for drones, but is very capable for any other kind of mobile robots.

With the Pixhawk 6x-RT there is a powerful flight controller, using the NXP i.MX RT1176 dual-core processor. While this and other controller hardware do offer a hardware debug probe, it is not a simple task as there are different pin-outs and connectors, making debugging a mess with different cables and adapters. To simplify this, I have now a unified debug CMSIS-DAP debug probe using the NXP LPC55S69 as processor, with all the different headers and UART adapters included: the MCU-Link-MR (Mobule Robots) debug probe.

This article describes the MCU-Link-MR debug probe. It is an open source hardware debug probe based on the NXP MCU-Link debug probe, but built as open source hardware with KiCAD and has different UART and debug headers added to work with different robot platforms, including Pixhawk ‘full’ and Pixhawk ‘mini’ ports.