Description: a significant shortfall for many people wishing to use ArduPilot is the lack of an integrated camera/gimbal system, such as are common with DJI platforms.
In addition, DJI manufacture some good vehicle platforms, that a growing number of users are converting to ArduPilot.
The ability to natively interact with DJI CANBus subsystems such as gimbals, cameras and escs would greatly benefit ArduPilot users, and leverage the engineering efforts of DJI whilst maintaining the freedoms and capabilities of ArduPilot.
I just recalled that there had been this blog on DiyDrones: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/universal-adapter-for-dji-gimbals, in which some legal concerns were discussed. I’m not a law person, god knows, and really can’t say anything, but wonder if that’s a potential topic of relevance here too. I think the protocol is not public.
Legitimate point. I’m not a lawyer either, but proprietary protocols are regularly reverse engineered by the open source community, and at least one ArduPilot dev has a history of doing such things. I also think that it isn’t completely silly/naive to just ask DJI if they’ll give it to us.
the diydrones poster uses a
Jetson TK1 with an Innodisk EMUC-B201 PCIe to CAN adaptor
and the camera video feed is connected to the USB port of tk1, while the rest of the gimbal is connected to the canbus adapter… so as far as the hardware goes… it’s all off-the-shelf.
Thanks! - unfortunately the code hasn’t been open sourced afaik. Ideally there wouldn’t be a need for the Jetson though: a direct CAN implementation would support more users.
A very worthy proposal, and some earlier and preliminary conversations with some at DJI were promising. But there does not seem to be enough manpower to pursue such a project at this time, so funding committee is expiring this. Thank you for the initiative!
