Hello,
just gearing up to enter the Arducopter experience. The wealth of information available about the UAV and its hardware and software is brilliant, but I can find very little mention of what's an adequate radio.
How many channels are required for manual flight control, looks like 4? Then we seem to need switches for location hold, height hold, return to launch, manual/autopilot (a 3-position switch plus a 2-position switch could cover these?) Then we'd need a spare channel for controlling a camera say, and one spare for future use? What do people recommend please?
Also, 35 MHz or 2.4 GHz for use in the UK, is either OK? Any other gotchas with radio choice?
Thanks very much.
just gearing up to enter the Arducopter experience. The wealth of information available about the UAV and its hardware and software is brilliant, but I can find very little mention of what's an adequate radio.
How many channels are required for manual flight control, looks like 4? Then we seem to need switches for location hold, height hold, return to launch, manual/autopilot (a 3-position switch plus a 2-position switch could cover these?) Then we'd need a spare channel for controlling a camera say, and one spare for future use? What do people recommend please?
Also, 35 MHz or 2.4 GHz for use in the UK, is either OK? Any other gotchas with radio choice?
Thanks very much.
Replies
Current software supports only mode changes from radio switches. No dips or other ways. So to have it working properly minimum of 6ch is required for full functions. Ok on our latest code we have experimental auto acro<=>stable mode system that frees one switch.
But like said.. It is always good to have few extra channels for future use, it's a small extra investment when getting your first radio but in future it will save a lot money.
After we have camera mounts on board 8 ch would be good to have then you can have 2 mode switches for different things and also pan & tilt knobs for your camera.
And I can say that there is no need to go for expensive radios if you are afraid of that. Turnigy/EMAX has really great low cost 9ch radio that has "crappy" software in but for quad you anyways don't need to have any special features. And there are already some people doing rewrite for it and it is full open software.
I have Futaba 7 ch (cost 400 USD) and Turnigy 9X (cost 59 USD) + 60 USD for modules, Futte has not been used since I received my TGY :)
Can we use (to reduce the initial investment during test phase) only a 4 channel radio if no extra functions are added and if we preselect the mode ?
And to complete the question, how is it possible to statically select the stable mode ?
In a second phase I think a 7 channel radio could be fine to:
ch5: mode selection
ch6: GPS
ch7: camera
thanks