Hello All,
Long time lurker while I’ve collected parts. I’m at the point now to share some progress and ask some questions. I’m building this for my parents who have 4-5 acres to mow.
I’m completely new to all of this and anything RC related. Alot of parts could have been downgraded for cheaper, but being new to this, I wanted to make sure it worked first. So I waited and bought used/open box for several items to save cost.
Having learned some in this process, I think a Kakute H743 Wing and a UM982 (dual antenna heading GPS) might have been a cheaper choice. The Kakute has more UART connections and the UM982 would allow freeing up another UART but keeping the heading function. At the time I bought the 2 F9Ps, the UM982 was relatively unknown and required a lot of noob unfriendly hoops to jump through to work. I think that’s change, but let me know your thoughts and suggestions on that too.
Once this is working, I’d like to add obstacle avoidance. I have a RPi5 8GB ($150 - open box) and an Intel RealSense D435f ($170 - open box) already.
If you see where I’ve screwed up for any of this or have suggestions, please let me know. I’ll add my first questions in reply to this message.
Special thanks to marblecreek for sending me the Super400 actuator arms.
Lesson learned: My servos are sporadic in response. Sometimes they are quick and move as expected. Sometimes they take more time to return to center (or other position) but do so in smaller uneven steps. See video below.
The problem was testing with a lower amp wall power supply for the bench test. After changing to a more powerful power supply the problem is gone. Obviously long term, the boost converter will be wired to the battery.
Not much action here on the forum lately it seems, thats a bit of a bummer. I’m close to pulling the trigger on hardware for a mower project myself. Currently working with a small rover just to gain familiarity with setup.
simpleRTK+ tripleband GNSS antennas. Its been awhile since I looked at the specifics.
I’m uncertain on the telemetry setup, it will probably be the next things I buy, since I can use it with the test rover. I’ll probably buy a radiomaster TX16 with whatever needed telemetry radios make the most sense. I currently just have a cheap flysky radio.
I’ve got a Mateksys F405 wing FC currently, not sure If I should get something diff yet or not.
I have the F405 with a simple gps board on my small rover project, and have been tinkering with that to get most of the learning curve sorted out before I buy the expensive parts (RTK gps mainly).
I have a couple of JD zero turns we currently mow with, I need to decide on which one of them I would put this stuff on still.
Id be interested to hear about your overview plan for the RPI/depth cam. I’d need to think about that a bit, I’d guess the RPI would be connected via serial to the FC? Would this run everything on the RPI, or feed data to a Lua script?
For the obstacle avoidance, The RPi will be connected to the FC via a UART connector. I was going to start with the parameters that are built into Ardupilot and see where I get, but I’ve also see some people use Lua. That’s new to me also, so baby steps. I’ve played with lua on theTX16S, but scripts that others already made.
