I've recently been working on building a new QuadCopter based on the ArduCopter for fully autonomous flight. My goal is to use this without the need for a transmitter or receiver, by pressing a button on the physical quad to start the autonomous program.
However, I am now having trouble figuring out how to do this in the Mission Planner, or if it is even possible. I can't seem to find any place to even fire up the motors to make sure that they're working that doesn't require the use of a joystick.
Is a transmitter/receiver pair strictly necessary, or is it possible to run this without it? If it's possible, does anyone have any pointers to where I should start?
Replies
Check this out! Looks like a fully autonomous flight: http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/arducopter-2-2-beta?commentId...
I have flown Arducopter with Tx turned off, but was using a joystick. Just enable joystick via the joystick button on the Actions tab on the Flight Data screen of Planner. It should be trivial to modify Planner code to do what you like from there, or even add a button to Arducopter to initiate auto... Grab a clone via Git and start hacking!
It's certainly possible, and we already fly that way on ArduPlane, which uses the same hardware and very similar code. But it would require some modifications of the ArduCopter code to arm the ESCs without RC input. You'd also have to disable the RC failsafes, of course.
I don't think that what you have envisioned will be possible quite yet because of code limitations. You may also face legal issues because you must have the ability to switch to pilot-in-command at all times.