I have several VTOL planes, ranging from small ones (Manta Fimi) to over 2m of wingspan. I have learnt the hard way many times that the transition is very tricky and it is extremely important to learn about its status. In particular, if the min. airspeed has been reached. Of course there is a gcs message but I prefer to receive audio messages as I want to watch the aircraft in this flight phase.
I’ve set up the lua scripts so that I use a battery capacity parameter for that. I set the value in the script, and OpenTx can read out the values. I can assign say
0 to flying without VTOL
1 to transition completed, VTOL motors still active but switching off
10 transition running
50 transition failed
The question is: how to detect these phases in the lua script? Is this possible at all?
I’m checking the PWM/signal value of one of the vertical motors. I’ve tried the is_vtol_mode() but it seems to change to 0 when the transition is still underway. Of course the flight mode can be obtained but is it of any use here?
As far as I’ve learnt so far, parsing gcs messages in lua scripts is not possible?
The most critical thing is to know if the vertical motors are off, so that not to drain the battery when flying over a forest etc. But it is also important to know as quickly as possible that the transition was fine, even if the VTOL motors are still running.
Could it be possible to introduce a transition_status() LUA function, returning values for:
-transition completed, vtol motors still working but with decreasing power
-transition completed, vtol motors off
-transiton initiated
-transition failed
-no transition initiated, vtol flight