Arducopter Manual_control (QGroundControl Joystick)

Hello, as in the topic, is manual_control supported on arducopter latest release?

Would be great to have it so we can use QGC with joystick.

If not is there any plans on supporting it in future?

Corrado

You mean like this?
http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/flying-with-a-joystickgamepad-instead-of-rc-controller.html

Yes i mean like that but with Qgroundcontrol. I already do it with mission planner and everything works as it should. But from what i understand to use joystick with Qgroundcontrol with ardupilot the firmware itself should support a mavlink command called manual_control.

So my question is if Ardupilot can be used with Qgroundcontrol and a joystick.

Corrado

That’s probably a question for the people developing QGC:
https://discuss.ardupilot.org/c/ground-control-software/qgroundcontrol

It seems that it is added 5 months ago to arduplane: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot/commit/6d2e6bd6607d78e245585865d9f6f6772244b1a1 Could someone merge this to copter? Would be nice feature.

Yes i have seen it was added sometime ago to arduplane but looks like arducopter still lacks it.

I asked Qgroundcontrol guys and they said, it is a feature that ardupilot guys need to implement and it is, as described before, manual_control support.

It would be very very nice to be able to use Qgroundcontrol and joystick on ardupilot, hope some devs add it to arducopter as they did with arduplane.

thanks,

Corrado

Only around 20 lines of code if the same functions are available in copter. "case MAVLINK_MSG_ID_MANUAL_CONTROL: " seems to be in copter code also, but it is empty and does nothing.

Maybe some nice dev could copy paste and commit this from plane to copter? :slight_smile: I can compile and test it, if needed. Thanks

Would really like a comment from a dev if possible.

regards,

Corrado

Hey it seems it is actually added already to the copter about a year ago as Chinese66 pointed out in a different thread:

Not sure what I was looking before because I did not spot this. Maybe wrong file or old revision or something…
Can you test does it actually work? I’m interested using it also

Just tested on latest Qgroundcontrol 3.3.0 and latest Arducopter 3.5.5 and joystick (perfectly functioning on Mission Planner) doesn’t show in the parameters in Qgroundcontrol. So i guess Arducopter still doesn’t support the correct Manual_Control message to enable joystick under Qgroundcontrol.

Tested one of the “supported” joystick as in qgroundcontrol instructions and the joystick axis look like they work, so somehow the joystick is supported but still missing the buttons, Qgroundcontrol says that all buttons are reserved to firmware, while on px4 can be assigned to tasks as it should be (same as mission planner).

So at the moment i would say that the joystick on Qgroundcontrol using arducopter is far from usable, no custom joystick supported (same a px4 and a shortcoming from qgroundcontrol itself) and no button supported on arducopter making it unusable at the moment.

It is a real shame as Qgroundcontrol looks very good and usable and far more polished than anything else at the moment.

regards,

Corrado

Is there still any interest for button support for QGrooundControl and ArduCopter?

I’m working on it, but I need to explore some more code to get it working properly.

I’m new to writing Ardupilot code, so the progress is slow.

Alex

On my side there is definitely “a lot” of interest, i don’t know if there is more interest around, but i would be surprised if not, since Qgroundcontrol looks really nice and would be really great to be able to use it with arducopter and a fully supported joystick.

Corrado

@JAR4x4 Did you make further progress on this issue? I would be very interested in getting this to work.