Hello,
first of all I'm new here and want to apologize just in case I violate any forum rules.
Not sure if this is the right place for following topic:
I've an existing Kopter (Arm-o-Kopter) using uart controlled ESC's.
I want to try a PixHawk on the same frame and I'm curious if it's possible to use this type of ESC's.
The uart protocol is very simple. Only 1 wire is used (tx from flight control, no rx), it runs at 115200 baud, 8N1. Input is ignored until >= 0xF5 is received, where we start counting to MOTOR_ID, at which the received byte is used as throttle input. 0 is neutral, >= 240 is FULL_POWER.
0xF5 M1 M2 M3 M4 0xF5 M1 M2 M3 M4 ... Mx = 0...240 (200 in older versions)
Another description (in german though) is here:
http://www.armokopter.at/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=31&p=70#p70
As I2C type ESC's are already integrated it would be nice to also support these uart ESC's.
I'm willing to help as much as I can. I can do the testing and maybe also the programming if someone points me in the right direction ...
Anybody's interested ?
Best regards,
lakeroe
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Replies
Daniela,
In arducopter we don't actually support the I2C ESCs or the UART ESCs. I've poked around a little looking at adding support for CAN based ESCs but it's doesn't appear super simple. There was once a pull request which added support for the mikro-kopter UART based ESCs but it never made it to master for some reason. Maybe if you look at the "closed" pull requests it's in there somewhere.
The integration is a little tricky.. I suspect that the PX4Firmware layer has support but then we'd need to change the AP_Motors library to use it. Another option would be to re-implement the code to interface with the ESCs using a similar method that's been used to talk to the FRSky telemetry. I suspect this 2nd choice is the way to go.
-Randy