Question about upgrading from apm to pixhawke for boat

After going absolutely nuts trying to get my Arduboat (4’ Kayak with thruster and max speed of 4mph) to run correctly, I found out that APM’s are no longer supported, and it’s recommended to goto a pixhawke. For the life of me, I can’t find any documentation on if the pixhawke has PWM inputs like my APM 2.6 does. All I see is a reference for a spectrum radio.

Also, will the old GPS / Telemetry / Power modules I have laying around work with a new controller?

Thanks,

Joe.

P.S. Where do you even begin tuning these things?!

No PWM input, you will need a converter if your radio receiver doesn’t have PPM, or S-Bus output, something like:

You can use the other parts, BUT you will have to make/splice to the different connectors that are on the Pixhawk. You might want to get a better GPS than the APM’s one, but I still fly a APM with all the parts I bought from 3DR, but I am limited to very old software on that machine that isn’t supported or upgraded.

Sorry- I can’t help on boat tuning- never did one of those.

Most modern transmitter/receivers provide PPM, Spektrum or SBUS and most of the ArduPilot compatible modern flight controllers support any of these input types The Pixhawk family is the most command and well documented so it’s a good choice.

I can help you tune a boat when you get to that stage. The method is documented on the wiki but we can walk you through it in any case. For steering, the ATC_STR_RAT_FF is the most important parameter to get right, if that’s right, it’ll probably work OK. For throttle/speed, it’ll probably just work but the most important parameters to get right are the CRUISE_THROTTLE and CRUISE_SPEED and there’s an auxiliar switch option to allow capturing the correct value as you drive it around in MANUAL mode.

Thanks for the input guys. This part of a youth club project, so money is tight to say the least! We have already had to buy everything for this project at least twice, so trying to re-use older equipment and just getting the pixhawke versus getting the kits that come with everything is a much better choice.

Thank you for the adapter for pwm to ppm… our transmitter / receiver is a flysky…so it’s low on the features and options.

Joe- I sent you a PM- check the upper right icon to see. I may have some stuff I can send you for the Kids.
Joe