When I went into this drone hobby, somebody who quit the hobby sold me everything he has but the flight controller is defective. Not knowing the use of the SD card that time, I bought the Holybro Kakute H7 V2 and was very happy with the performance of the quad until it came to a point that I want to put the addressable LED’s to make it look nice. I went and purchased the WS2812 LED Strip not knowing that I need to run LUA scripts to send signals to the LED’s. But because my FC don’t have an SD card, I cannot run LUA scripts. I then installed a MINI PRO Arduino to drive the LED’s and its working, but I want to make it smarter by interfacing the Arduino with the flight controller. Is it possible to send PWM signals from some of the outputs of the flight controller like turn on one output if there is a failsafe? Send the copter pitch and roll signal or the LiPo battery voltage. Something along those lines. This flight controller has M5, M6, M7 and M8 motor outputs but I am using it only for a quad so I have extra 4 outputs I can use to interface the Arduino. I just don’t know how to tell the FC to send the data I want. Any help would be appreciated. Not a must to have but it would be nice to have.
If you have an extra UART available on the FC maybe the best is to create a MAVLink interface between the Arduino (using 3.3V signal levels) and the FC. This way your Arduino have access to a lot of information (copter pitch, roll, battery voltage etc.) from the FC.
There’s an arduino firmware somewhere that reads the mavlink messages and you can adjust its settings to make the LEDs respond however you like to flight mode changes and failsafes.
I think I found it. I will try this route. Lets see how the Arduino firmware can do.
Here’s a very basic WS2812 LED patterns flown at dusk.
Wow… hard core stuff but interesting. Wish me luck to make this work. I hope the Arduino Nano or Mini has enough hoursepower to process all those information.
Put in your own compass for the lights.
Yup that is one option.
Another option is MavLink by Arduino. I recon this is smarter as you can get info from the FC and process it to trnslate into LED Pattern to indicate what it means.
Please share if you get it to work. Night flying with lights is awesome.