is it possible to control the rover with a 4in1 flight stack (Hakuke H7 v2 50Amp 30X30) and standard pistol grip car style transmitter RC6Gs v3 7 channel radio. If not directly then perhaps indirectly running the radio through a microprocessor to program outputs to the flight controller?
What output protocol does the Receiver for that system have? If it’s one Ardupilot recognizes (Sbus, PPM, etc) I don’t see a problem.
A Flight Stack will work no problem assuming the Rover motor(s) are brushless. Brushed motors are more common for Rovers.
I use car radios (3ch (steering/throttle/mode (mix)), 4ch (steering/throttle/mode (mix)/arm), sticks/pistol) on Ardurover balance bots (brushed/brushless/stepper).
Preferable SBUS to FC.
Interesting: I hadn’t seen car radios with so many channels. Is there any with the OpenTX standard?
You can connect a Crossfire Transmitter module to some of those Transmitters.
good call, i found on their website it supports a TBS crossfire module. should then be able to connect to the FC with UART then.
i found in the spec on the website that it does support the following, PWM PPM/PWM SBU.
So yes it does support SBUS.
on the FC the receiver is typically connected with UART. since the receiver just has 3 pin rc outputs, How do you connect it to the FC?
Depends on the FC. Some have dedicated “rcin” ports others you use a UART and set a parameter for rc for that port. If the Rx outputs Sbus you will not have a problem. You only need 2pins , signal & Gnd.
currently I have the Hakuke H7 FVCpaired to a Jumper T Pro with a 2.4 X2 ExpressLRS receiver. I have not flashed ArduPilot onto it yet. Currently it is set up with BetaFlight. I don’t want to use the two stick radio on my project. I prefer to use the car pistol radio and assign channels as I need.
The RC6G 3V transmitter only has two mixers built in and does not allow the flexibility I am looking for for programming. I am hoping ArduPilot Rover will allow that with the pistol radio.
while it looks like TBS Crossfire is one solution, it is a very big module and not really any place to mount it on the transmitter so I prefer not to go that route.
I am pretty new to channel mixing and completely new to using flight controllers.
I am building a 4x4 truck that has 4 brushless motors, one in each wheel and 4 wheel steering.
I want to use the switches on the transmitter to be able to use finger throttle trigger in the following modes via changing switch positions
- all 4 wheels at once
- front wheels only
- rear wheels only
4 front left wheel only
5 right front wheel only
6 rear left wheel only
7 rear right wheel only
additionally i want to use the steering wheel and a switch to choose between
- front and rear left or right
2 front and rear opposite for tight turn radius
3 front only steering
4 rear only steering
I would abandon the pistol Tx immediately and change to one that runs EdgeTx. Ardurover does not directly support what you want to do so you will have to rely on mixes in the Tx and you will likely need more than 7 channels. Perhaps Lua scripting on the FC could do some of what you want.
There will likely be a Lua expert chiming in here to elaborate on that.
It seems you are conflating autopilot features with on-transmitter mixing. The autopilot will do whatever the channels assigned tell it to do - it doesn’t care what specific switch/pot layout is attached on the other end.
I guess it might be possible to do some magic with Lua scripting, but that seems like a bit of a kludge.
A few quick searches don’t turn up any fully featured pistol grip radios. They all seem to be geared toward simple rock-crawling/racing applications with few channels required and little to no mixing.
Someone did this with a Taranis radio, if you want a significant DIY project and have a 3D printer:
Taranis Pistola: A pistol grip RC controller with a Taranis QX7 inside! by Eficker - Thingiverse
At the end of the day, I’m confused as to why you need an autopilot on a Rover project that requires such a significant amount of RC control that you need a specific controller layout to feel comfortable with it.
I went ahead and removed the 4 independent ESCs. They did not support BLHeli32 or any kind of programing. I removed the 7 channel pistol receiver and have installed a Kakute H7 FC /F4 65 amp ESC stack and Jumper T Pro Tx, 2.4Ghz Happymodel EP2 ELRS Rx. The radio us updated to run EdgeTx. I have updated firmware on the H7 to Ardupilot.
I have attach 2 high power servos to a separate
Castle Creations CC Bec Pro which is capable of up to 20Amp output.
Currently I am trying to figure out how to attach servos to the FC. Since the H7 is set up to run as many as 8 motors, I believe I can attach the signal wires of the servos to motor output 5 and 6 of the flight controller.
I am not at all familiar with flight controllers, 4in1 ESCs, TX/Rx using ELRS and EdgeTx so this is an uphill learning curve to say the least. I burned out my H7 FC over the weekend. Battery was off but i touched a wire to something and shorted it out. I suspect the 1000Um capacitor on the ESC power input was still holding a charge. very expensive mistake.
A lot of blah blah blah i know. I am hoping the new configuration can give me the single motor, single servo control I am looking for.
- all 4 wheels at once
- front wheels only
- rear wheels only
4 front left wheel only
5 right front wheel only
6 rear left wheel only
7 rear right wheel only
additionally i want to use the steering wheel and a switch to choose between
- front and rear left or right
2 front and rear opposite for tight turn radius
3 front only steering
4 rear only steering
Now that you have smoked the Flight Controller what functionality were you expecting from it anyway? I’m not talking about all those drive combinations.
don’t then follow your question. I will want to be able to track to GPS coordinates eventually. would like to use gyro to help control vehicle direction. way down the road, autonomous driving crawler. Not totally sure as this is all a learning project, expensive one, yes but learning is the goal. I have replaced the controller and am up and running again, figure of speech as currently there is no running going on. flight controller is functioning and I am starting to familiarize myself with Ardupilot.
I need help with servo connection and control. Ardupilot setup has servo output 1 through 16. How do i connect servos to the flight controller? is power from external BEC and signal to one of the remaining 4 motor connections correct?
These are the configurations that Ardurover supports. Note that the omni configurations are for use with Mecanum wheels.
Rover Configurations
So, for what you are trying to do set all the motors for throttle and the servo(s) for Groundsteer and go from there. I think only a couple of those drive options you note will be controllable via autopilot functions. All else will probably have to be manual/passthru which is essentially the same as not having a Flight Controller.
What type of motors do you plan to use? Brushed or brushless they have a gearbox. What are going to do with the non-driven motors when you disable them?
Brushless motors no gears all direct drive
V62 210KV MAD COMPONENTS… https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BC7PJJF?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
If not being driven they would freespin.
Flight controller does not have conventional rc connections as shown in Motor and Servo Configuration — Rover documentation
So im still confused on how to hookup servos to the flight controller
It has 8 outputs, connect-em up. If you are using PWM for the motors then connect and assign the motors and servos however you want.
Can you move them with your ESC on an independent test such as with a servo tester?
I have direct drive on a balance bot with 140KV motors (with sensors as position encoders).