Hey guys,
I had a quick question around mounting a LiDAR on a stabilised platform on a drone to counteract the pitch/tilt of the airframe. I was thinking about a steward platform with some servos however I'm using something like this below and it already sits 5" above the airframe. Would anyone have any idea? I'm planning on flying around 15-20mph and theres definitely going to be some pitch, if the drone comes near an obstacle but can't spot it because if the pitch, then its pretty much screwed, I'd like to counteract this by having it always horizontal.
In any other case I'd love to make something like the Scanse LiDAR however I can't really work out what motor they're using. I've tried looking for hollow stepper motors as I presumed they were using that, however they're all around 5mm in diameter and no slip ring will fit in those... Would anyone be able to shed light on this too ? :D
In other details I'm using the SF30/b by LightAware.
Thanks for any help, really appreciate it!
Replies
@Neil - it is possible to use a gimbal motor with a hollow shaft and slip rings to perform the scanning motion. This gives a light weight solution and has about the same torque as a stepper. For the second axis you could use a very small servo mounted directly onto the laser with the whole laser/servo combination rotated together. It can get quite complex ;)
Thank you! I think this sounds good. The only other issue is how do you control the revolutions per second of the motor since they're brushless. I was using an arduino previously with the stepper motor, ideally I want to get it to do around 2-10 revolutions per second. Thanks for the help :-)
Driving a brushless motor is similar to driving a stepper in micro-stepping mode. It could be quite "interesting" making a driver that will run on an Arduino :)!
There may be some standard shields available. The regular gimbal motors that you can buy cheaply from China will run in continuous rotation from less than 1 rps to about 10 rps if the driver is made correctly and many of them come with matching slip rings.
Thank you!
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