Has anyone used these components before with the Ardupilot Rover support for Torqeedo motors? They are slightly different than the setup shown in the wiki tutorial (that one shows the Torqeedo Travel 1103). One visible difference is there is no “motor extension cable” in our system. The cable going to the motor assembly is the same 5-pin RS485 as connects to the remote throttle device.
It feels like there should be compatibility here, but we have not gotten it to work yet.
At the moment AP only officially supports a single Torqeedo motor that uses the custom RS485 serial protocol (as described on the wiki).
There is a to-do item (here) to add support for multiple Torqeedo motors and also add support for the higher powered motors that use the J1939 CAN protocol.
While AP doesn’t officially support J1939 CAN a user called Nubbish created this Lua script that may work. Nubbish and apache8080’s conversation about this can be fouind in AP’s Discord server’s “canbus” channel. If you’ve never used AP’s discord server you can find a link on our contact-us page, look for “ArduPilot Discord (live chat)”
I suspect that I could enhance our driver to support the more powerful motors but I’d need to get one of these devices somehow. That could be a full working setup or maybe just a part of it (like the throttle) would be enough. I’m not sure. Anyway, I have tried in the past to get Torqeedo to send me a motor so I can add support but I didn’t have any luck. I will try again.
I believe the Cruise 3.0 FP operates on the old RS485 protocol but we never managed to get Ardupilot talking to it as done on the wiki page. It seems like there should be a way to do it. Nubbish on discord mentioned this.
So this means that Torqeedo uses 3 different protocols depending on the model? RS485, J1939 and TorqLink? I’m just trying to figure out which we should support.
In the diagram above the “Backbone 5 pin data cable” is presumably TorqLink? and the 4-pin is J1939?
Ideally we would like to both be able to control the motor and get feedback from the motor and battery… so that probably means taking the spot occupied by the throttle in the diagram above.
Re getting the RS485 protocol working, I think the most likely issue is the RS485-to-serial converter hardware. The wiki lists has a link to a custom RS485-to-serial converter that is known to work (designed by me and a company here in Japan) so I think trying to use that is the best plan. Obviously I have a conflict of interest 'cuz it’s my company selling them but really, we’re really providing it as a service to the community. At the low volumes we sell them it’s not a money maker :-)… and if someone else wants to make and sell them to the public I’m very happy to help them.
