After several days of discarding obvious possible problems and not getting my gimbal to fully work with ArduPilot, today I finally gave up. However, I do have some pieces of evidence of what the problem could actually be and I need your help to confirm my suspicions.
First off, I followed this instructions very carefully and set up the ArduPilot system to communicate with the gimbal over mavlink. I did the same thing on the gimbal side through the SimpleBGC GUI. I then found that the communication was working just one way (ArduPilot to Gimbal) because the GUI was showing all received params as OK and I also have manual RC control, except for Control using DO_MOUNT_CONTROL through Mission Planner.
My suspicion was that the Gimbal was for some reason not sending Heartbeats to the ArduPilot, so I enabled the debug featured and recorded the messages. What is weird to me is the heartbeat message itself: 1.MAV.v1.out.3 #0 (1,154) [00 00 00 00 1a 00 10 03 03].
If I’m not mistaken, the MAV_TYPE is set to Generic and not as a Gimbal type, hence, the ArduPilot doesn’t recognize it (based on the code written for the SToRM32 mavlink mount). I could also confirm this through Mavlink Inspector where component 154 doesn’t show up under Vehicle 1. If this turns out to be true, then the problem is on the Gimbal side and software related.
Here is my setup:
- CubeOrange with AC4.1.2
- SimpleBGC 32bit extended with 2.70b4 + encoders
Any thoughts, comments, and possible solutions are welcome!
Happy new year!