Rev 8 (ICM-45686) Version

PX4

Support in PX4 1.14.3 release and later.

Ardupilot

Supported in 4.5.0 stable release and later.

Rev 3/4 Version

PX4

Pixhawk 6X is supported on PX4 1.13.1 release and later.

Ardupilot

Supported in Ardupilot 4.2.3 stable release and later.

Rev3 & 4

Standard Baseboard

Mini Baseboard

Pixhawk Baseboard Reference and Downloads

Pixhawk 6X Module CAD File

Key Design Point

• High-performance ADIS16470 Industrial IMU with high accelerometer dynamic range (±40 g), perfect for accurate motion sensing in demanding UAV applications

• All New advanced durable vibration isolation material with resonance frequency in the higher spectrum, ideal for industrial and commercial drone applications

• High performance STM32H753 Processor

• Ethernet interface for high-speed mission computer integration

Features

• Triple redundant IMU & double redundant barometer on separate buses

• Modular flight controller: separated IMU, FMU, and Base system

• Safety-driven design incorporates sensors from different manufacturers and model lineups

• Independent LDO powers every sensor set with independent power control.

• Temperature-controlled IMU board, allowing optimum working temperature of IMUs

PX4 Autopilot

If you are using PX4 Autopilot, please refer to the PX4 user guide page for additional information.

Ardupilot

If you are using PX4 Autopilot, please refer to the PX4 user guide page for additional information.

Pixhawk 6X Pro is supported on Master/Main or PX4 1.14.3 release and later. PX4 Firmware Target: FMUv6x

Pixhawk Baseboard Reference and Downloads

Pixhawk 6X Pro Module CAD File

The newest batch of Pixhawk baseboard V2 now supports switchable PWM signal voltage (3.3V or 5V). The modification requires the user to open the casing of the Pixhawk flight controller and be familiar with soldering.

To switch the PWM signal voltage, bridge the 3v3 or 5v soldering pads on the PCB by applying solder on the pads. Make sure the unused pads are cleaned and not shorted.

Pixhawk baseboard V2-A and V2-B have slightly different PCB designs. Follow the red square in the diagram below to locate the PWM voltage select soldering pad.

Power1 (Main) & Power2 Port (Backup) (2.00mm Pitch CLIK-Mate)

Telem1, Telem2, Telem3 ports

GPS 1 Port

GPS 2 Port

CAN1, CAN2 ports

Uart4 & I2C port

SPI Port

USB Port

I2C Port

ETH Port

AD&IO Port

DSM RC Port (JST-ZH 1.5mm Pitch)

RC IN Port

IO Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

RSSI Port

FMU PWM OUT (AUX OUT)

I/O PWM OUT (MAIN OUT)

Processors & Sensors

• FMU Processor: STM32H753

  • 32 Bit Arm® Cortex®-M7, 480MHz, 2MB flash memory, 1MB RAM

• IO Processor: STM32F103

  • 32 Bit Arm® Cortex®-M3, 72MHz, 64KB SRAM

• On-board sensors (Shipping Currently, Rev8)

  • Accel/Gyro: 3x ICM-45686 (with BalancedGyro™ Technology)

  • Barometer: ICP20100 & BMP388

  • Mag: BMM150

• On-board sensors (Previous Revision, Rev3/4)

  • Accel/Gyro: BMI088/ICM-20649

  • Accel/Gyro: ICM-42688-P

  • Accel/Gyro: ICM-42670-P

  • Barometer: 2x BMP388

  • Mag: BMM150

Electrical data

• Voltage Ratings:

  • Max input voltage: 6V

  • USB Power Input: 4.75~5.25V

  • Servo Rail Input: 0~36V

• Current Ratings:

  • Telem1 output current limiter: 1.5A

  • All other port combined output current limiter: 1.5A

Mechanical data

• Dimensions

  • Flight Controller Module: 38.8 x 31.8 x 14.6mm

  • Standard Baseboard: 52.4 x 103.4 x 16.7mm

  • Mini Baseboard: 43.4 x 72.8 x 14.2 mm

• Weight

  • Flight Controller Module: 23g

  • Standard Baseboard: 51g

  • Mini Baseboard: 26.5g

Interfaces

• 16- PWM servo outputs with hardware switchable 3.3V or 5V signal mode (requires base board modification)

• R/C input for Spektrum / DSM

• Dedicated R/C input for PPM and S.Bus input

• Dedicated analog / PWM RSSI input and S.Bus output

• 4 general purpose serial ports

  • 3 with full flow control

  • 1 with separate 1.5A current limit (Telem1)

  • 1 with I2C and additional GPIO line for external NFC reader

• 2 GPS ports

  • 1 full GPS plus Safety Switch Port

  • 1 basic GPS port

• 1 I2C port

• 1 Ethernet port

  • Transformerless Applications (AN2190 50 Ohm termination)

  • 100Mbps

• 1 SPI bus

  • 2 chip select lines

  • 2 data-ready lines

  • 1 SPI SYNC line

  • 1 SPI reset line

• 2 CAN Buses for CAN peripheral

  • CAN Bus has individual silent controls or ESC RX-MUX control

• 2 Power input ports with SMBus

  • 1 AD & IO port

  • 2 additional analog input

  • 1 PWM/Capture input

  • 2 Dedicated debug and GPIO lines

Other Characteristics

• Operating temperature: -40 ~ 85°c

Power1 Port (2.00mm Pitch CLIK-Mate)

Telem1, Telem2 ports

GPS 1 Port

GPS 2 Port

CAN1 port

I2C Port

Eth Port

DSM RC Port (JST-ZH 1.5mm Pitch)

SBUS RC port

IO Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU PWM OUT (AUX OUT)

I/O PWM OUT (MAIN OUT)

The Pixhawk Baseboard v1 has been replaced by the v2A & V2B. See the Baseboard Changelog for difference.

Power1 (Main) & Power2 Port (Backup) (2.00mm Pitch CLIK-Mate)

Telem1, Telem2, Telem3 ports

GPS 1 Port

GPS 2 Port

CAN1, CAN2 ports

Uart4 & I2C port

SPI Port

USB Port

I2C Port

ETH Port

AD&IO Port

AUX & RSSI

RC IN Port

IO Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

DSM RC Port (JST-ZH 1.5mm Pitch)

IO Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU Debug Port (JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU PWM OUT (AUX OUT)

I/O PWM OUT (MAIN OUT)

Block Diagram

Reference Wiring Diagram

Two methods to flash the board:

SDK Manager:

This is a GUI-based solution by Nvidia which can be found from the link below: https://docs.nvidia.com/sdk-manager/install-with-sdkm-jetson/index.html

Note: Keep it in mind that at the time of writing this document, we chose to install Jetpack 5.1.2.

Command Line:

You could benefit from Nvidia flash guide .

Weight

• Without Jetson and Flight Controller: 85g

• With Jetson, no Heatsink or Flight Controller: 110g

• With Jetson and Heatsink, no Flight Controller: 175g

• With Jetson, Heatsink, and Pixhawk 6X Flight Controller: 185g

• With Jetson, Heatsink, Pixhawk 6X Flight Controller, M.2 SSD, M.2 Wi-Fi Module: 190g

Dimensions

(Unit in milimeter)

• Without Jetson and FC Module: 126 x 80 x 22.9mm

• With Jetson Orin NX + Heatsink/Fan & FC Module: 126 x 80 x 45mm

CAN2 on the basboard is conneted internally to both FCU and Jetson module. The basics could be implemented from Nvidia user guide:

However, you could follow the below quick commands might make you able to loopback test the CAN connection between Jetson module and FCU on Jetson's terminal:

The last command has to have the following output if can is running OK:

Popular cameras supported out of the box include IMX219 camera modules such as Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2. For theCSI camera basically you could benefit from Nvidia guide

Holybro Jetson carrier board can have two CSI cameras connected. To give a short intro you can try the following commands in terminal in case you carrier board is connected to a display screen:

To open the capture on a specific cam you can pass the following (assuming we want to test cam1 on Orin_camera 1):

Processors & Sensors

• FMU Processor: STM32H753

  • 32 Bit Arm® Cortex®-M7, 480MHz, 2MB flash memory, 1MB RAM

• IO Processor: STM32F103

  • 32 Bit Arm® Cortex®-M3, 72MHz, 64KB SRAM

• On-board sensors

  • Accel/Gyro: ADIS16470 (±40g, Vibration Isolated, Industrial IMU)

  • Accel/Gyro: IIM-42652 (±16g, Vibration Isolated, Industrial IMU)

  • Accel/Gyro: ICM-45686 with BalancedGyro™ Technology (±32g, Hard Mounted)

  • Barometer: ICP20100

  • Barometer: BMP388

  • Mag: BMM150

Electrical data

• Voltage Ratings:

  • Max input voltage: 6V

  • USB Power Input: 4.75~5.25V

  • Servo Rail Input: 0~36V

• Current Ratings:

  • Telem1 output current limiter: 1.5A

  • All other port combined output current limiter: 1.5A

Mechanical data

• Dimensions

  • Flight Controller Module: 38.8 x 31.8 x 30.1mm

  • Standard Baseboard: 52.4 x 103.4 x 16.7mm

  • Mini Baseboard: 43.4 x 72.8 x 14.2 mm

• Weight

  • Flight Controller Module: 50g

  • Standard Baseboard: 51g

  • Mini Baseboard: 26.5g

Interfaces

• 16- PWM servo outputs with hardware switchable 3.3V or 5V signal mode (requires base board modification)

• R/C input for Spektrum / DSM

• Dedicated R/C input for PPM and S.Bus input

• Dedicated analog / PWM RSSI input and S.Bus output

• 4 general-purpose serial ports

  • 3 with full flow control

  • 1 with separate 1.5A current limit (Telem1)

  • 1 with I2C and additional GPIO line for external NFC reader

• 2 GPS ports

  • 1 full GPS plus Safety Switch Port

  • 1 basic GPS port

• 1 I2C port

• 1 Ethernet port

  • 100Mbps

• 1 SPI bus

  • 2 chip select lines

  • 2 data-ready lines

  • 1 SPI SYNC line

  • 1 SPI reset line

• 2 CAN Buses for CAN peripheral

  • CAN Bus has individual silent controls or ESC RX-MUX control

• 2 Power input ports with SMBus

  • 1 AD & IO port

  • 2 additional analog input

  • 1 PWM/Capture input

  • 2 Dedicated debug and GPIO lines

Other Characteristics

• Operating temperature: -40 ~ 85°c

PX4

Ardupilot

Helper Scripts

Serial Connection

Ethernet Connection

Since there is no DHCP server active in this configuration, the IPs have to be set manually: Once the ethernet cables are plugged in, the eth0 network interface seems to switch from DOWN to UP.

You can check the status using:

You can also try to enable it manually:

It then seems to automatically set a link-local address, for me it looks like this:

This means the Jetson’s ethernet IP is 169.254.21.183.

IP setup on FC

Now connect to the NuttX shell (using a console, or the MAVLink shell), and check the status of the link:

For me it is DOWN at first.

To set it to UP:

Now check the config again:

However, it doesn’t have an IP yet. I’m going to set one similar to the one of Jetson:

And check it:

Now the devices should be able to ping each other.

Note that this configuration is ephemeral and will be lost after a reboot, so we’ll need to find a way to configure it statically.

Ping test

First from the Jetson terminal:

And from the FC in Nuttx Shell:

MAVLink/MAVSDK test

For this, we need to set the mavlink instance to send traffic to the Jetson’s IP:

For an initial test we can do:

This will send MAVLink traffic on UDP to port 14540 (the MAVSDK/MAVROS port) to that IP which means MAVSDK can just listen to any UDP arriving at that default port.

For instance:

Power 1 (Main), Power 2 Ports

(2.00mm Pitch CLIK-Mate)

Tel1, Tel3 Ports

CAN1, CAN2 Ports

GPS1 Port

GPS2 Port

UART4 & I2C Port

(also shown as UART&I2C on some board)

SPI Port

FMU USB Port

I2C Port

ETH-P1 Port

IO Debug Port

(JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

FMU Debug port

(JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

AD&IO port

DSM RC Port

(JST-ZH 1.5mm Pitch)

RC IN Port

SBUS Out Port

FMU PWM OUT (AUX OUT)

IO PWM OUT (MAIN OUT)

Orin USB2.0 Port

Orin Debug

(JST-SH 1mm Pitch)

Orin I2C Port

Orin GPIO Port

Orin Camera0 Port

Camera Serial Interface (CSI)

Orin Camera1 Port

Camera Serial Interface (CSI)

Orin SPI Port

Orin I2S Port

Flash EMMC

First, we need to have the CM4 up and running. We need to prepare the hardware for it first. Considering the fact that you have already mounted your CM4 onto the baseboard do the following to be able to flash any required image on RPi CM4:

1. Switch the Dip-Switch on Holybro Pixhawk 6X+CM4 base board (located on top of UART&I2C port) to RPi

2. Connect the baseboard to your desktop computer USB-C CM4 Slave port used power & flash the RPi CM4. There may be a prompt on some systems like macOS to allow the connection. Please allow it! Otherwise, where to connect? 😀

3. You need to use usbboot:

Linux / Cygwin / WSL

Clone this repository on your Pi or other Linux machine. Make sure that the system date is set correctly, otherwise, Git may produce an error.

This git repository uses symlinks. For Windows builds clone the repository under Cygwin:

Note: sudo isn't required if you have write permissions for the /dev/bus/usb device.

macOS

From a macOS machine, you can also run usbboot, just follow the same steps:

1. Clone the usbboot repository

2. Install libusb (brew install libusb)

3. Install pkg-config (brew install pkg-config)

4. (Optional) Export the PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that it includes the directory enclosing libusb-1.0.pc

5. Build using make

6. Run the binary

If the build is unable to find the header file libusb.h then most likely the PKG_CONFIG_PATH is not set properly. This should be set via export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$(brew --prefix libusb)/lib/pkgconfig".

If the build fails on an ARM-based Mac with a linker error such as ld: warning: ignoring file /usr/local/Cellar/libusb/1.0.26/lib/libusb-1.0.dylib, building for macOS-arm64 but attempting to link with file built for macOS-x86_64 then you may need to build and install libusb-1.0 yourself:

Running “make” again should now succeed!

After running rpiboot the below screen from your terminal should say that you are good to go for flashing a new image onto your CM4 board.

Note: if there are any pop-ups after this stage to eject an unknown disk, simply ignore them.

• You can now install your favorite Linux distro, e.g. Raspberry Pi OS 64bit, using The rpi-imager. Make sure to add wifi and ssh settings (hidden behind the gear/advanced symbol).

1. Once done, unmount the volumes, and power down the CM4 by unplugging the USB-C CM4 Slave.

2. Switch Dip-Switch back to EMMC.

3. Power on CM4 by providing power to the USB-C CM4 Slave port.

4. To check if it’s booting/working, either check HDMI output, or connect via ssh (if set up in rpi-imager, and wifi is available).

Connect PX4 to CM4 via serial

Pixhawk 6X talks to CM4 using Telem2 (/dev/ttyS4).

1. To enable this MAVLink instance, set the params: - MAV_1_CONFIG: TELEM2 - MAV_1_MODE: Onboard - SER_TEL2_BAUD: 921600 8N1

2. reboot the FMU

3. On the RPi side, you can connect it to Wifi using a router or a Wifi Dongle.

4. Enable serial port to FMU by using raspi-config: Go to 3 Interface Options, then I6 Serial Port. Choose - login shell accessible over serial → No - serial port hardware enabled → Yes Finish, and reboot. (This will add enable_uart=1 to /boot/config.txt, and remove console=serial0,115200 from /boot/cmdline.txt

5. Now MAVLink traffic should be available on /dev/serial0 at a baud rate of 921600.

Try out MAVSDK-Python

1. Make sure the CM4 is connected to the internet, e.g. using a wifi, or ethernet.

2. Install MAVSDK Python:

2. Change the system_address="udp://:14540" to system_address="serial:///dev/serial0:921600"

3. Try out the example. Permission for the serial port should already be available through the dialout group.

You can also use your own power supply to power the RPi CM4 baseboard.

The Holybro Pixhawk RPi CM4 Baseboard combine the Pixhawk FC module with the Raspberry Pi CM4 companion computer in on compact form factor with all the connections you need for development. It follows the Pixhawk Connector and Autopilot Bus Standard, allow easy swap of FC Module with any FC that follows the Pixhawk Bus Standard. The FC Module is internally connected to RPi CM4 through TELEM2, and can also be connected via ethernet with a external cable provided. Recommend minimum specification for RPi CM4:

• Wireless: Yes

• RAM: 4GB (or 8GB)

• eMMC: 16GB