I’m trying to use a joystick to control my drone through QGC (running on a MacBook). QGC finds my controller, and I can use its buttons to execute arming commands, but I can’t throttle the motors. The throttle slider moves, but the motors don’t. Somehow I think the joystick isn’t being properly connected because it should show up in the top bar where the red rectangle is in second pic. My drone works fine. Position and altitude hold both generate enough thrust to lift it.
Did you calibrate the joystick?
Yep! It took 30 seconds or so to go from the last step (first pic) to complete (second pic). I’m not sure if that’s problematic. My flow is that I calibrated the controller, used stabilize mode, and then armed the drone. When I armed the drone, all motors throttled, but not enough to lift the drone. I then tried to throttle the motors using the controller which had no effect. After 3-4 seconds, it disarmed without me wanting it to.
My drone properly took off using altitude and position hold. It was drifting like crazy in random XY directions, but the motors are definitely able to generate enough lift. Part of the drift may be attributed to altitude and position hold expecting input from the joystick, and my joystick either wasn’t detected or was using the default settings.
No, it shouldn’t drift in a position hold mode.
Also have you checked that the center position currently corresponds to 0 thrust? Is that what you want? Personally I think it’s better to just use the bottom fo the stock as the 0 position when using a gamepad but that is a pain to fly in manual modes but the best in autonomous modes.
Yes the joystick has to be detected and I think it’s not being detected as the icon is not being shown in screen. Can you verify whether it works on another OS if possible?
We tried it on Windows OS with two different controllers. Still no luck. We enabled the joystick and then calibrated it. There’s no still no joystick icon in the top bar. We have no radio configured because we want to fly this autonomously, would that change our setup?
Is the joystick detected by the PC in the first place? Maybe missing drivers?
You are going to need one anyway to configure and tune the craft properly. I wouldn’t attempt that with only a Joystick.
It started working on Windows even though the controller icon never showed up in the top bar. We also used an Xbox controller, so I’ll do more debugging to see if it was an OS or controller issue.