Me and my team have been trying to set up an interface with a water probe sensor, which outputs a 0-5V analog voltage signal, corresponding to the water’s concentration.
We are going to use ROS (Robot Operating System: www.ros.org) to control the UAVs autonomously.
Basically, we need the Copter to do the following:
( receive command from Ground Station) --> (Land on water) --> (Lower the sensor using a DC motor) --> (process the reading) --> (send it back to ground station)
For an initial step, we want to be able to capture the 0-5V readings from the sensor and have the arducopter send it back to base, and we are having a lot of trouble with this.
As far as my understanding goes, this would require me to understand the Arduino code and write my own library for enabling this level of control, which, given the size of the code, is quite daunting.
We are using APM 2.6 and using roscopter to interface with the APM and Ground Server.
So, any help or orientation to achieve this would be much appreciated.
try instead of using a DC motor to use a continues rotation servo motor which which cam be easily controlled by the apm then try to connect your sensor to another arduino with an xbee on different freq (lets say your using 3DR radios for the APM they work on 900 or 480MHz with a range of up to a mile , so you get an Xbee pro 2.4GHz so they wouldn’t interfere with the 3DR but have the same range) that way it’ll be much easier to make an arduino code that sends the feed back and you’ll have another Xbee connected to your laptop which can be running a program to read the input such as processing, this way you’ll have your UAV doing what it’s supposed to do, and when you have enough experience with coding you can modify the code of the APM and Planner to do this without the arduino and Xbee,
which program did you use to edit the mission planner?
tell me if things worked out that way or another, and if there’s any way we can help each other, I’d be glad to offer my assistance
while i was going the mission planner source code i found a link to QGroundControl which the mission planner is based off, and they have a developers guide, with all needed documentations, and there MAVlink tutorial for integrating it with ROS qgroundcontrol.org/
Hi guys, my need is similar. i wish to control a camera from a fixed wing (don’t shoot me - the helo guys know about this stuff). I want to control the pan, tilt and zoom in a belly mounted turret. Any help or advice you can offer would be gratefully received.
Oh - all my hardware is less than a month old so PX4 etc.