Hi, all. I am having trouble running the radio calibration on Mission Planner.
At the calibration page, I can see for a split second the green bar showing, but then disappear and only grey bar left. Any movement I did with the stick doesn’t show anything on screen.
Before I go on further, I have to preface that I have no absolute experience with flying and RC plane, let alone messing around with a flight controller. I was roped in to handle an UAS project left behind by a team at my job. They are not working on this anymore. They have close to nothing on what they did before, so I was going in blind. On top of that, I am handed all of their previous hardware and asked to develop from there.
With that said, I’ll lay out what I have done. I am testing everything on a cardboard box with some spare parts to simulate a plane, so that at least I don’t damage too much parts. I should also add that this project was started close to 3 weeks ago (2 weeks of trying to source the Pixhawk from nearby regions and reading whatever I thought important for the project, and 1 week actually wiring and testing the whole stuff).
Initial parts: Corona RP8D1 Rx, Esky 0406A Tx, Pixhawk with assorted included modules, 3DR V2 telemetry radio, a bunch of servos to represent control surfaces, propless motor, ESC with separate BEC wired in series (I think).
Before I wired up for the Pixhawk, I bound the Rx to the Tx and tested all the servos successfully and all ran well enough. My first setup is exactly like how it’s recommended to be, like from this page: http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/advanced-pixhawk-quadcopter-wiring-chart/ except that I changed the servo inputs following the plane layout.
There’s one thing that I did differently based on the advice of one of the previous project member (now hard to contact and provide on hand advice): that is to power the Rx separately with its own BEC and battery.
Recently (like just 1 hour ago) I have read that this will actually fry the IO portion of the Pixhawk and I must send in for a replacement. If this is true, then I’m SOL, as there’s that export ban on 3DR.
For the time being, is there any way for me to test if the IO portion is fried or not?
If that’s not the case, moving on.
I also read that, while the Corona Rx I’m using has PPM output, it seems that I have to perform some mods to enable it to output through the pins as the way it’s implemented by default, it’s not this way… Therefore I binned the idea of using the Corona Rx and the Tx.
My next setup is taking a FrSky TFR8S Rx from an existing plane I have on hand that’s bound to a Futaba TF8G Super Tx. I made a separate profile for my test ‘plane’. I made sure that the servos and motor still fires directly. Finished connecting to the Pixhawk again, but this time I did not provide separate power to the Rx (mind you this is before the knowledge that this will fry the pixhawk that I found 1 hour ago). Following the calibration wizard on Mission planner, everything else can be calibrated successfully except of course the radio calibration.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I feel that this should be enough information for someone to start offering some advice how to proceed, as I got so many information from googling, but I don’t know how all the info can help pertaining my predicament. Thanks. :D
Replies
Is it possible that the setting on my Tx has something to do with cannot calibrate the radio?
Make sure your FrSky is in PPM mode (with the jumper). If you can drive servos from it directly, it's not!
Thank you for the answer, but I'm still a bit confused.
Looking at the Rx manual, there's a part instructing how to create a ganged, multi-channel receiver, that shows which channel to bridge. Still not clear which pin to bridge.