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DeveloperPermalink Reply by Randy on July 19, 2012 at 9:04pm

 

    Interesting timing.  Robert Lefebvre and I were just talking about the new camera support which is going into 2.6.1 and whether it would work on the heli.  I believe it will work.  It looks like that camera is a yaw and pitch (aka tilt+yaw) camera..it doesn't include roll right?

 

     The only thing is that it's not immediately clear to me how with our current software, the pilot can control the roll or yaw of the camera...in the arducopter code we allow the ch6 to controll the tilt but not the other axis...in fact, the underlying camera mount control code does allow this though..we just don't have it "exposed" to the pilot.

 

     How would you like to control the camera's position?  Through a joystick connecting to your ground station computer?  ..or maybe you have a 9 or 10 channel tx which has a little joystick on it?  Honestly, i don't know how people do this sort of stuff..

 

P.S. at first I couldn't make your link work but it's just because the final "l" has somehow dropped off the link.  Here it is again.

http://www.helicamsolutions.com/Products/Pro_60-3x/pro_60-3x.html

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Permalink Reply by BlackNova on July 20, 2012 at 6:30am

I'm looking at just having the camera pointing vertical to the ground ( toward the center of the earth ) and possibly pointing forward.  Either way it would be done without external inputs.

How would testing of the code be done.  I'm willing to test the final product but I'd be uneasy testing it if it will interfere with the stabilization and control of the helicopter.

Good catch on that URL, can't seem to find a way to edit the original message, though.

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by R_Lefebvre on July 20, 2012 at 6:52am

Randy, as Greg says, typically camera operators do not want to control roll other than "keep it level", so they don't have any input.  In fact, some don't have a servo on roll at all, and just rely on mass and some dampers to level the roll with the gimbal simply "hanging".  Normally a joystick would be used to control pitch and yaw.  I could see the possibility however, of an input to trim the roll.  That might be useful.

BlackNova: Yes, this pretty much is PhD stuff.  You would have to be an extremely good programmer to just jump in and understand it at this point.  The code makes extensive use of classes, pointers, pointers to pointers, pointers to classes, classes pointing to other classes... :eek:

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Permalink Reply by Greg Fletcher on July 19, 2012 at 9:24pm

The answer is yes, it can. Just not yet. Some one needs to finesse the code for copters a bit.

@ Randy yes it can control roll. If you think about it do you want to control roll or just have it level with out thinking about it. A stabilized cam needs to control a roll servo, but doesn't need operator roll input.

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Permalink Reply by BlackNova on July 20, 2012 at 6:37am

What part of the code needs to be finessed?  As long as it doesn't require a PhD to understand the mathematics, I might be able to do some finessing.

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