Today, I tested a gripper and successfully convinced my friend to eat a hamburger that I delivered. However, there was an issue—the gripper released the payload before reaching my friend’s position.
RCIN.C11 and RCOU.C11 during flight
According to my plan, the drone was supposed to fly in AUTO mode to waypoint 6, then switch to LOITER to release the hamburger. However, I didn’t see it drop as expected. After checking the log file, I found that the gripper had released the payload somewhere between waypoints 5 and 6.
Hello @Allister , I used a joystick for GCS, and both the RF controller and GCS control the gripper via RCIN.C8. How can I determine whether RCIN.C8 is coming from the RF controller or GCS? At that moment, I lost connection with both, but the gripper was still activated. I want to understand why it was triggered.
Just to make sure I understand correctly, you had a joystick connected to a laptop AND a traditional RC controller?
If they are both controlling the RC8 channel then if you switched from the joystick to the RC (or the other way) if there is a difference in their output to RC8 the flight controller will see that as a triggering RC8 and in this case releasing the lunch. Switching between the RC controller or the GCS Joystick doesn’t necessarily have to be something you did. The radio failsafe could have triggered it. I didn’t look for that in the logs, but check the time stamps for when RC8 was activated against when the radio failsafes occurred.
So, during the incident happen, is the RC engaged or the joystick from the PC is engaged? My understanding, at one time, only one device can be engaged. If both can engaged at the same time and two pilots are controlling, how disaster will it be.
Running with two controllers is possible, but you need to be careful because of incidents like this. The easiest thing to do is simply commit to a single controller if that’s possible. Or, on the joystick disable the ability to run the gripper. You still have the option to use it on the laptop.
If you do want to keep the same hardware then you need to make sure you have a process in place to make sure that both the joystick and the RC controller have all the same settings, all the switches are in the same place or state before you launch the mission. It’s a procedural fix, not a hardware/firmware one. I’m not aware of a way to do this in the software because the system is only really handling one at a time.