Arducopter for a heli -- basic questions

I’ve just received a Mini Pix which I intend to use with Arducopter in a TRex 500 fbl heli. I’m reasonably familiar with setting up Arudcopter for my hexcopter, but I’ve got a couple of basic questions regarding the heli. I’m using MP 1.3.75 and I’ve loaded ArduCopter v4.0.7 onto the Mini Pix.

My first question regards the Heli Setup section on the Setup page; The leaflet that came with the Mini Pix says that swash servos 1-3 and rudder servo should plug into outputs 1-4 respectively, and the ESC into output 6, but the MP Heli Setup page doesn’t show any servos in the drop-down lists against the channels, so do I just select ‘Motor 1’, ‘Motor 2’, etc. for the five outputs I’m going to use? And what is ‘HeliRSC’ that appears by default against output 8? Google seems to think it’s ‘HeliESC’.

Secondly, I’ve calibrated the accelerometer on the bench as if it were mounted horizontally in the heli, with the Mini Pix arrow facing forwards. Can I mount it sideways, on the side frame, providing I recalibrate it accordingly?

Allan,
Have you checked out the Trad heli wiki? That should answer a lot of your questions.

The default settings of Motors 1-4 for Outputs 1-4 is what you want.

For the ESC control you will set HeliRSC for the output your ESC will be connected to. It defaults to output 8 but it sounds like you will use output 6 for your Mini Pix.

Yes you can mount it sideways and then calibrate it with it mounted. And even if you decide to mount it horizontally, I would recommend you calibrate it on the vehicle. That way you can set the aircraft with the rotor shaft perfectly vertical and have it set your AHRS trims.

Lastly i would suggest post in the traditional helicopter section of the ArduCopter category in discuss. you would get a lot more responses that way.

Thanks Bill. You’ve given me what I need. I hadn’t seen the trad heli wiki, but I’ll give it a good look now.

As for posting in the traditional helicopter section, I thought that’s where I had posted it. I haven’t yet figured out how to select where to post, but traditional helicopter showed on my screen when I wrote this post, probably because that’s where I was viewing last time I visited.

I changed the category for you. This post is now in tradheli.