I was wondering if ardupilot supports this kind of swashplate, a V shape 2 servos. I’m not sure if H3 setup can work.
Maybe you can get it to work with the H1 configuration? Its talked about here as the non ccpm setup. I think its intended for collective pitch still but i cant think of any technical reason it cant work on what appears to be a fixed pitch heli in the pic? Is that a c127?
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/traditional-helicopter-swashplate-setup.html
yea, it is C127, but i bought the brushless motor from C127AI, hahaha it is probably better to buy the C127AI straight away instead. I got it to work with rotorflight and it fly pretty nice, but I want to use it with optical flow that why I want to switch to ardupilot. I’m going to upgrade the motor and the battery to 18650 and don’t want to control the dang thing for 40+ min
I’m not sure if ardu traditional heli supposes bluejay bi-directional RPM like rotor flight
I agree that the H1 would be the best one. You will have to use RSC mode 3 which is throttle curve to have the RPM change with the collective stick You can read more about the RSC in the wiki.
I’m not sure what this does. So I can’t say if we support it.
i looked at the wiki, it looks like we support it? Bidirectional DSHOT, allows the Flight Controller to receive RPM telemetry over the esc line. THe ESC firmware originally is BLheli_S, so I have to update to bluejay for Bidirectional
1 Like
aw dang, it doesn’t work, the throttle channel still able to move the servo up and down. I tried to limit and collective blade pitch angle and pwm, still doesn’t work.
Ardupilot definitely supports dshot but I’m not sure it will do any good if this is a fixed pitch heli.
The throttle chan on the tx should be trying to control collective and ardupilot would normally control the rotor but I think you can basically ignore rcs. It sounds like the tx>fc is configured correct but fc>servos/esc is not mapped correctly.
You just need to figure out how to map the ardupilot collective pitch servo output for h1 to the esc throttle then a bunch of tunning to get it to work well.
What fc are you using? This is an interesting project.
I’ll figure some else tomorrows. right now, for H3 config, the throttle channel move the 2 servos up and down for the collective control(don’t really need it for a fixed heli 
), the rate of the pitch is low due to its expecting a third servo. I wish I can can use H1 setup, but the linkages is setup as V in front, instead of 1 one the side and 1 the back. So pitch forward, its need to 2 servos to move down.
it is betafpv 12a v3, I’m not using this, not enough pin out and I don’t want to solder to the chip and remap-rebuild the firmware, I’m using a modified omibibus F4 pro for 1s right now
I guess your best option to control such a configuration would be through a custom mixer using Lua script.
You could set the swashplate to H1 to get pure pitch and roll outputs from the heli attitude controller, then use them to feed the inputs of the custom mixer and publish new outputs (with the correct mixing on different output pins) to the actuators. Be sure to follow Bill suggestion on the RSC mode to control the throttle.
It does but you need to flash your board with the specific BD_Shot_heli firmware version in order to get telemetry back.
@Ferrosan Does that mean you can use BD shot for RSC in trad heli?
@Lu_Hoa I think the V at the front is correct for phasing of fixed pitch to have one aileron and one elevator servo but I might be recalling it incorrectly. Either way if its fixed pitch there is no mix that moves collective so you have have to work out what angle they mix or phasing to get those 2 servos to control pitch and roll correctly. When they move at the same time its just mixing aileron and elevator to control the tilt angle not collective. The throttle stick moving the servos is just some mix mapped incorrectly in Ardupilot.
you right, usually a normal fixed pitch heli has a L shape configuration, just need one servo to control aileron and one for elevator, and H1 non-CCPM should work? I think. They were trying to be fancy when designing this C127ai haha. it would be cool to try to get this setup to work, but I don’t have a 2MB board for the custom mixer to work and I don’t want to try to dig too deep in this problem, since I have a k110s where i can port this over, need a quick remix for my CAD files for K110s though. Right now, I’ll keep this heli for rotorflight. Thanks fully the gear ratio for the c127ai and k110s and the same, basically the same motor
Correct. I have it on my Protos 380 FPV heli :
I’m using the rpm feedback for motor governor as well, since this heli is really small and already many wires I didn’t want to add an external rpm sensor.
1 Like
@Lu_Hoa
Did you checked how the two servos work just only direct with the normal RC?
Are both moving just for only pitch or only one of them?
Are both moving just for only roll or only one of them?
The only AP swash setup could be from theory the H1 configuration as in any H3 you always have mixing of pitch, roll and collective.
.
I was busy with work these weeks, thanks fully I was able to sort most of it. The good news is that it was able to fly, but I had to bang my head a few times.
- oh man, it was a struggle to get dshot to get to work for Bluejay. It was also a struggle to update from BLheli to Bluejay (i don’t even know why I did this), I can’t get blhei-suit to work for the life of me, the only way I was able to get it to update was to disable everything and update 1 esc at a time.
- in the end, i was able to get everything to work, I used H3 generic ( servo1, -45deg, servo2, 45deg) and modified a bunch of stuff. H3 120 or 130 also works, but it is not true to the angle.
- I ran into a problem when I did my sanity check, all the control works perfectly, but during stabilize mode, the servo moves as expected for roll, heli roll left the servo tries to roll in reverse. I just can’t get the pitch to stabilize the right way( pitch the heli forward, the servo/swasp trying to go in the same direction). I think I pretty much did everything, from different swasp plate types, servo positions, and inverted servo. I also tried to move the FC back forward ( it used to be mounted 180yaw), did all the Calibration, and all that, same thing. I resorted to the last step, it felt like a sin and didn’t feel right. I inverted the RC2in(pitch) and set up the servos and based on that. I’m not sure if this is the correct way, but it flies
-was able to get the bidirectional dshot to work, rpm1 rpm2, it was nice.
1 Like
This is what I was attempting to build too. It sounds like a lot to get those sevos working right and Im not sure Ill be able to figure out the mixing like you did. Would you use this flight controller again or would you choose a different one after you know what you know now?