I’m new to remote control gadgets (at a technical level anyway) so I’m likely making a mistake. Hopefully someone can point it out.
My problem is that I can’t get flight controllers to “see” remote control input. At this point I’ve replaced my flight controller, transmitter, and receiver.
Originally I started with
Flight controller: Pixhawk 2.4.8
Firmware: PX4
Receiver: Tactic TRX600 (very old 72mhz fm receiver) with generic PPM encoder
Transmitter: Tactic TTX400
Now I’m using:
Flight Controller: Holybro Durandal
Firmware: ArudCopter 4.0.3 (ChibiOS)
Receiver: Spektrum AR620
Transmitter: Spektrum Dx6e
However, after flashing that flight controller over to Arducopter 4.x I got no inputs from the PPM encoder. I posted separately about that and kind of decided maybe it was just too old to work.
I went to the local hobby shop and bought the best remote they had in stock, it was a Spektrum Dx6e which came with a Spektrum AR620 receiver. The receiver supports DSM2 and DSMX. 6 channels and it will do 11ms or 22ms. The transmitter only supports 22ms but still either DSM2 or DSMX.
According to the release notes, arducopter has supported dsmx 22ms since January so all should be well.
The transmitter and reciever are bound to each other. The indicator light and the data on transmitter’s display show that all is well.
I couldn’t get the Spektrum transmitter/receiver to work at all with the pixhawk flight controller running aruducopter. Neither via DSMx nor using the PPM encoder. When connected via DSM, QGroundControl shows there are no detected radio channels. When connected via PPM encoder, the channels show up but there is no response when I move any of the controls.
I was only connecting the DSM/data port (vcc, gnd, data pins) to the pixhawk so I thought maybe I needed to supply power to the battery connector on the receiver. Spektrum says it likes 3.5-9v so I went with 9v. That was a mistake as the battery port’s VCC is connected to the VCC wire on the DSM port… 9v fried a couple of the chips on my pixhawk.
So I bought a durandal flight controller from holybro. Loaded up Arducopter 4 on it, and… have the exact same problem!
At this point I’ve tried two different FC’s, two different receivers, and transmitters. I can make the hardware work with PX4 firmware but it just won’t work with Arducopter at all.
Here’s a photo of my wiring:
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Seems like I must be missing something simple. I’m assuming there’s someone in the world successfully using arducopter 4, so it must be something I’m doing wrong.