Any help on a non-flight use case for Ardupilot?

Hi Everyone,

This is my first post here as initially I just want to find out from you all if it would be possible to achieve my goal by using the Ardupilot software and kit. Basically I’m trying to make a remote camera control system using a gimbal and tripod. The plan is to have an IMU on a tripod head and then send the information from the tripod to a remote gimbal and for the gimbal to replicate the movement of the tripod. We hope to get a 1:1 position replication of the tripod to the camera.

The reason for ending up on here is it seems to have all the required elements (IMU’s, remote transmission of information, open source etc.etc.). Based on this minimal explanation does anyone know if this system would support this? And if so how much of it would need writing from scratch and how much of it is already there?

Thanks in advance!

I would have said your best bet would be to use the antenna tracker firmware. That can be used as is to control your gimbal. You can easily transmit over the existing telemetry infrastructure. I think I am correct in saying that you would need to knock something up to translate what the tripod head is doing, into something that the antenna tracker would expect to receive . That shouldn’t be too difficult. For example, you could have a another flight controller on the tripod you are controlling (master) . With a bit of geometry you can translate the position into gps coordinates that are relative to the antenna tracker (on the slave gimbal) and then the slave gimbal would follow those coordinates as you move the master.
Hopefully that made sense (not sure I explained it very well).
That may be a long winded way of doing it. Perhaps someone else will have a better idea. But in short, yes you can do what you want, with relatively minimal coding work I would have thought.