I was wondering if there is any work on supporting the use of CAN based ESC’s telemetry stream for battery monitoring similar to how BLHeli based ESCs can be used. The information can be viewed from the ground station but I’d love to be able to have it drive contingency actions. Seems redundant to require a separate power module and in my application, there are few options rated to the power levels we require (electric ducted fan running 12S/160+amps).
Just set battery monitor type to 9 and it will do what you want. And after that, you can set the failsafes
Interesting, when i do that, it does not display voltage or current on the ground station.
I also havent received any warnings. This is a KDECAN ESC does that have anything to do with this?
Which ArduPilot FW version? Do the KDECAN devices measure voltage and current?
I am running Plane 4.1.7.
Yes they measure current, voltage, temp and RPM. These parameters are displayed under the status tab under esc1_current, esc1_volt, etc. When I used option 9 for battery monitor, none of these parameters are being used and that battery monitor reads zeros.
Maybe you need ArduPlane 4.2.1?
I’ll give this a shot. Thank you.
So this worked, kind of, I am running 4.2.1 on my drone. The issue now is that, while i get voltage and current, I am not getting any value for battery used. Do i need to upgrade further? I dont see anything in the release notes.
Did you set the battery capacity (mA.h) parameter?
Yes, same result on two different airframes. Battery Mah set separately. In both cases, current used is not being calculated using the same KDE ESC on CAN bus.