Spitfire76

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Posts posted by Spitfire76

  2. Posted · Report reply

    22 hours ago, Possibilities said:

    my son won't help me because he thinks I'm too old

    You are never too old to get into this as a hobby or even commercially. I am a lot older than you and started in this hobby back in 2013 and at that time you did need to build your own drone but of course the technology has come a long way since then and off the shelf drones are much easier to fly. It is though worth practicing on a relative cheap drone before spending a lot of money on a more advanced one. Personally though I still prefer to build my own but that's no longer needed to learn to fly.

  4. Posted · Report reply

    41 minutes ago, erfan said:

    can any one help with that ?

    I would not worry too much about having the compass/GPS not being exactly at the COG. What's important is to have the compass away from any electrical interference and the GPS an unobstructed view of the sky which if you have the module mounted 15cm above the platform is just fine. Of course the IMU in the flight controller works better if its located as close to the COG as possible.

  5. Posted · Report reply

    17 hours ago, dronepi3 said:

    I am looking for a cheap Ardupilot Quadcopter I can control with my raspberry pi using python scripts for $100 or less. 

    I replied to your recent post in the above thread. I imagine though that the Sky Viper is too small to add an onboard companion computer but I believe that you could use the Pi as a remote computer to run python scripts.

  9. Posted · Report reply

    15 hours ago, dronepi3 said:

    Any help would be enormously appreciated guys!

    I agree with @Av8Chuck 's suggestion of checking out  http://ardupilot.org/copter/index.html. You can even setup an environment using their simulator to test your python scripts without having to use any drone hardware.

    http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/sitl-simulator-software-in-the-loop.html#sitl-simulator-software-in-the-loop

  10. Posted · Report reply

    23 hours ago, SeanMichaels said:

    Has anyone heard about a proposed bill that seeks to clarify and control two significant legal issues that remain unresolved: 1) Establish the airspace to 200 feet in altitude above private property as under the exclusive control of the property owner; and 2) Establish state, tribal and local governments as having exclusive and absolute rights to regulate that airspace?

    Any thoughts on whether this will move forward or not?

    Here's the link to an article regarding the proposed bill.

    https://www.idra.co/post/dronelife-new-drone-bill-would-make-the-airspace-over-people-s-homes-private-property

    Yes, I started this thread on this subject a couple of weeks ago.

     

  11. Posted · Report reply

    6 hours ago, erfan said:

    This is the controller of the landing gear :  Signal input : PWM signal, <1520us will deploy, >1520us will retract
    this landing gear came with the TAROT x6.

    In that case I don't understand either why its not working. I have the same settings and mine works fine although I am only testing it on the bench as the landing gear is no longer mounted on my drone. 

    One thing that you could try is to go to the "servo" area of the flight data menu and select the "low" and "high" buttons on servo 9. This should set the output to 1100 and 1900 respectively and in my case the landing gear does deploy and retract. 

     

  13. Posted · Report reply

    2 hours ago, erfan said:
    SERVO9_FUNCTION: 29
    SERVO9_MAX : 1900

    SERVO9_MAX : 1100

    CH9_OPT :29

    I have the same settings if you really meant SERVO9_MIN: 1100

    2 hours ago, erfan said:

    1) when opening landing gear:   it tries to open but it does not open . 
    2) When closing:  it closes smoothly which is fine. 

    Does open mean deployed and closed mean retracted ? (of course the landing gear needs to be "deployed" for landing)

    3 hours ago, erfan said:

    ch9in min : 982 (can be found in status and radio calibration )
    ch9in max : 2006  (can be found in status and radio calibration )

    Are these the values that you see in the status display when you operate the landing gear switch on you transmitter and is it 982 when the switch is down (deployed) and 2006 when the switch is up (retracted) ?

    What are the values of ch9out  with the switch down and up ?

     

  17. Posted · Edited by Spitfire76 · Report reply

    I need to correct my previous post - I recall that it wasn't that easy to get to work.

    Low/high PWM does not necessarily mean deploy/retract. It depends on the PWM value on the time of startup and the position of the landing gear. I had the landing gear deployed and tried these values as the startup PWM value

    • 1000 - increasing to 2000 landing gear retracted
    • 2000 - decreasing to 1000 landing gear retracted

    So its important when connected to the flight controller that it supplies a low PWM value at startup. 

    LGR_SERVO_DEPLOY 1000  (was 1750)

    LGR_SERVO_RETRACT 2000 (was 1250)

    LGR_STARTUP 2  (was 0, 2 uses the above deploy value)

    You said that you tried this but make sure you didn't reverse the deploy and retract values as the defaults were 1750 and 1250 which might have given you the impression to set them to 2000 and 1000 respectively. 

     

  18. Posted · Report reply

    17 minutes ago, erfan said:

    yes please that would be good,

    My first test was simply with a servo tester and so not driven by the flight controller. I found that when the PWM is low the landing gear is "deployed" and when its high its "retracted" so maybe I was wrong about the triggering by going high to low or low to high. Its also "deployed" when I remove the servo control cable from the landing gear controller. This would simulate loss of signal from the transmitter if the fail safe on the receiver was set to "no pulses.

    I''l check next with the Pixhawk. 

  19. Posted · Edited by Spitfire76 · Report reply

    4 hours ago, erfan said:

    No I am not sure How it is triggered ? (for me is TL6X001 landing gear )
    what I suppose it is also based on change in PWM,

    I tried what you said gain the same result,

    when closing there is no problem it closes smoothly.
    but when opening it tries to open up in several steps (it opens and closes consistently).

    I also tried with Receiver it worked fine .but don't know where is the problem ?
    @Spitfire76

    ok, did you reboot the flight controller after making those changes ? If you did I'll make some tests here as its been awhile since I used the landing gear. 

  20. Posted · Report reply

    23 minutes ago, erfan said:

    But when I manually close  (retract) the landing gear , it will be done just in one step meaning at one stage it will be closed.

    Do you know how the landing gear is triggered ?.

    For example the landing gear that I have is the HML 650 and I noticed that its triggered by a change in the PWM value rather than a low value being say the deployed state and a high value the retract state. There are 3 other parameters that help with this 

    LGR_SERVO_DEPLOY

    LGR_SERVO_RETRACT

    LGR_STARTUP

    I believe that I had to change the LGR_STARTUP_DEPLOY to 1000 and the LGR_SERVO_RETRACT to 2000 and LGR_STARTUP from 0 to 2

  21. Posted · Report reply

    2 hours ago, Patton3660 said:

    Hi all, was in an FPV racing club at UCF. And now I want to build my own drone from scratch with my own design. So I have a few questions and hope they can be answered here!

    I'm not a FPV racer but have built several drones from scratch and so maybe able to help.