I have drones using Arducopter and PX4. Will the antenna tracker design for Arducopter work for the PX4 drones as well?
Probably yes. Both talk mavlink
Depending how you’re routing mavlink, you could drop a small number of messages. There’s some differences in the versions of common.xml between the two projects, and ArduPilot can’t parse messages it doesn’t understand.
It looks like the latest topic on this is dated 2016 and the problem was being discussed for development. No further info. I suppose I can flash the Pixhawk 4 with Arducopter firmware. This should solve the Mavlink miscommunication problem. However, I like the PX4 format. It’s simpler to work with but there’s nothing on their websight or forums about this at all.
As far as I know PX4 don’t have an antenna tracker. If you don’t route the mavlink through the tracker controller (there are a number of possible configurations), you shouldn’t lose any messages, but if you choose to use ArduPilot on the drone and hit hurdles, the community here is pretty helpful.
If your drone is a common setup Missionplanner has a bunch of parameter files you can just load (from this list https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/tree/master/Tools/Frame_params)
Thanks for the link. I see there is a file for the copter parameters I currently use with PX4 and QGC. One question though, do I need to change each of these parameters manually or is there a way to upload the file as a whole?
You can upload the file. You should be able to “load from file” then “write params”, or words similar.