Using wind direction for a PWM output?

ArduCopter Copter 4.1
1

Hey everyone,

I am relatively inexperienced with arducopter, I’ve built a few things here and there but have only recently been digging into the full scope of capability and I have a problem I’m trying to solve and hoping the collective knowledge here can help me out.

I have a project where I am attempting to convert a telemetry output, namely the “wind direction” as a PWN value to drive a servo. I’ve been scouring the various forums and technical data but have yet to figure out a way to do this. So first question, is this even possible? I would essentially like to determine the wind direction and then have that value output a PWM signal to drive a light array indicating the wind direction for visual observers. It’s a bit obscure but I feel as though it should be possible. Is there a way to construct a LUA script to pull from telemetry data? As far as I can understand the feature is already being utilized by the auto tune function so the ability to access that data must be available, unless I’m mistaken.

I have two aircraft I would like to outfit with this feature. One is running a cube orange and the other a cube black, so I should, as far as I understand, have the processing power and storage to run the LUA. If there’s any other info you guys need let me know, thanks in advance!

1 Like
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Wind estimation is only available in 4.1.0 releases. So you will need that, but otherwise, you are on the right track.

3

Ok great I might cross post this over in the 4.1 section, thanks!

4

No need to cross post, I changed the category.

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I agree with amilcar that you’re on the right track. Lua scripts have access to the wind estimate but sadly we have no documentation yet on how to enable wind estimation on multicopters. Hopefully soon-ish.

6

Forgive me like I said I’m still pretty new to arducopter, are you saying that the wind estimation exists and is accessible by LUA, however the ability to enable the wind estimation as a function does not yet exist? So I can access the data if I could turn it on but I cannot yet turn it on? Thanks for the help!

7

@John_Caldwell,

The wind estimation feature is included in 4.1 and should work. We just don’t tell users yet how to make it work so you’ll have to figure it out. Even I don’t really know how to make it work actually.