I am building a tethered quadcopter in which the tether is actively managed in the base with a spool that maintains constant tension on the tether. On rare occasion I’ve run into an issue with the base that causes the spool to not allow more tether to be fed out. If this happens when the drone is being commanded to increase it’s altitude, the throttle output just gets higher and higher as the drone fights the tether until it suddenly cuts out and falls to a painful death. Is there a way that I can reliably apply a max current that acts faster than this throttle ramp up can occur? Our hover throttle is quite low (around 20%, around 25A), so even the 60% throttle that is listed in the wiki for the current limiting is quite high. I’ve tried setting the max current to 40A, but saw the current quickly spike well above that in the second before it dropped.
You could do this with Lua, but personally I would just add some sort of breakaway connector that disconnects the tether from the aircraft under sustained loading (like the aircraft continuing to accelerate upwards at max tether length) paired with a small onboard battery.