OK let’s let the bidding start at $100 Any takers? If it’s that easy it must be worth it for someone. All I want is another flight mode that’s a copy and paste of stabilized but with zero stabilization. Only throttle would control what happens to the motors nothing else. This new flight mode must have options to have stick inputs disabled and also the option of disabling outputs. Needs to work with both h&x quads and octos. Anyone interested?
i’ll have a go, but it will probably be a fair bit of trial and error, I will over write a mode you wont need such as drift or sport, what hardware are you running and what firmware version? I will use that as a starting point rather than master.
Awesome! Thanks Pete! I can send you an E transfer or PayPal or whatever you want just send me your email address. The flight controller we are using is a pixhawk 2.4.8. I’m fairly sure it is a clone. We have a bunch of that exact flight controller so that’s the only one we plan to use. The firmware I’m not sure but I just updated it last week so it must be current. I can check as soon as I get home. We rotate between H and X copter depending on which tests were doing. Lately it has been mostly H.
If it has to be just one type let’s do H quad but if it can work for H quad X quad and Octo that would be best. if it’s a lot of work just H is fine.
I have added the none stabilized output under sport mode, tested on my quad. Seems to work fine but be careful when your first try it as it could do unexpected things. I have changed the file extension to .txt to uploaded it here, you will have to change it back to .px4 then you can upload using the load custom firmware button in mission planner.
arducopter.txt (865.4 KB)
If it works as expected I can provide you with the code and put the changes into a custom mode.
Wow! That’s the best news I’ve heard all week! I’m going to test out tonight as soon as I get home!
Well it seems to do exactly what I wanted. I just tried it on a small quad with the props off and I like it. I’m going to do some more thorough testing and report back. But so far so good!!!
So I burned through 4 batteries on a small regular quad with 10” props and did some aggressive testing. Man it’s amazing how good that Pixhawk coupled with the amazing Arducopter software can recover. When I flip into this new mode “ i’m calling it Pete mode” the quad just flops over and starts flailing around. Flip that switch back to stabilize and she instantly recovers. So I’m quite happy with the results. The only other thing I could ask for if it would be easy Enough is the ability to turn off outputs somehow in the software. This would be for while in forward flight we may want to shut down some of the motors. I have no idea if it’s possible. Again we can’t just do it with the taranus because we have other flight controllers bound. If not I’m thinking another option is to find some sort of small relay that can open up the Control circuit going to the ESC’s or something like that. Thanks Pete I really appreciate it!!!
you could set up a motor emergency stop switch on a aux Chanel, this will kill all the motors. Also throttling back should work if you two channels for the throttle on the taranis. The only trouble is that currently Arducopter will disarm if the motor emergency stop is left on for too long.
I was thinking more along the lines of shutting down half the motors while in forward flight to conserve power and having the option to toggle which motors shut down. Like a switch that shuts down motors one through four and another one that shuts down motors five through eight etc… But I have found RC relays that will do the trick. We are going to use them to simulate failures anyways.