I been reading a lot about how crappy is the ar.drone, but at the moment I have one and I have an APM 2.6. While my proper UAV gets to the country (that will take about 2 months) I can can work on getting used to the APM software side.
My current problem lies on getting the ardrone motors to spin when I connect them to the APM, I found the conector pinout is this:
Pin 1 Battery 11.4V
Pin 2 VCC 5V (ATMega8a VCC Pin4+5)
Pin 3 TX+RX (ATmega8a Pin30+31)
Pin 4 IRQ to main board (ATmega8a PC3 Pin26)
Pin 5 GND
Pin 1 Red
Pin 2 White
Pin 3 Motor1=Yellow,M2=Orange,M3=Blue,M4=Green
Pin 4 Motor1=Purple,M2=Gray,M3=Brown,M4=Pink
Pin 5 Black
With no success I did this:
Pin 1: directly to the battery
Pin 2: APM out 1 Positive pin
Pin 3: APM out 1 "S" pin
Pin 4: Not connected
Pin 5: APM out 1 Negative pin
It did not work but it did not blow the driver either.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Cheers
Luis
Replies
This won't work as is. The ArDrone seems to have a protocol that sends a control string that embeds the speed required as a serial binary stream, containg the motor speed and LED status on/off/red/green. The output from the APM is PWM signal as required by a RC ESC (electronics speed controller). You will need to rewrite part of the APM FW to output this new speed controller protocol for it to work.