Howto: Taranis telemetry for the F3FC

[GAntonjo]

This is a request for how to configure the Taranis plus to show the telemetry data from the F3FC in a good way. This hopefully will be a nice howto for us all;-)

I have manged to get telemetry data from the F3FC, through my X4R-SB receiver, to my Taranis Plus. I can see total battery as VFAS, Current as Curr, and there are some other sensors. As I am pretty fresh on using the Taranis with telemetry, I am not sure what all sensors mean, and which ones to be monitoring more than others. Actually having some triggers to put out “low battery” warnings or “total current usage” would be nice. For instance, there is one sensor named “Fuel”. Anyone knows what this tells?

I hope someone with experience can make a list of all the sensors given from the F3FC (more precicely, the ones visible in the Taranis, with source, like F3FC, X4R-SB, Taranis and so on, indicated) and a meaning of each sensor.

I guess there could be needs for tweaking of some parameters to make all sensors show correct values. How to tune these would also be nice to see.

On behalf of all Taranis noobs out here, thanks in advance for your excellent help.

[swissfreek]

I believe fuel is a percentage of the pack that remains. I won’t have my F3FC to play with for a few weeks and none of my boards have a current sensor, but I assume this is a calculation of mAh used vs pack capacity. I know for VFAS in the telemetry setup screen you can set min and max, I would assume for Curr you would do the same based on pack capacity and then the Taranis would do the math for fuel.

I would write up some stuff about telemetry but others have done it better than I could. In YouTube search for Painless360 and Joshua Bardwell. Both have lots of Taranis videos including telemetry. Painless360 in particular goes over in detail how to set things up to look nice on the screen and do voice alerts. Me personally, I am only concerned with VFAS, but once I get my F3FC with current sensor I will monitor that as well. I set my switch SH to speak VFAS to me when I click it, and an alarm to warn me when I’m below 14.8v (3.7v/cell). Again, those two YouTube channels will explain how to do that. With a current sensor I would use current as my warning to land when I start to get close to 70% or 75% of pack capacity (buffer to come in and land) and probably have voltage as a backup. I guess you could also have an altitude warning since there is a barometer now, too. Basically once you figure out how to do VFAS monitoring from one of those videos, all the other sensors work the same way. Those videos also show how to log the telemetry to the SD card and read it later, which is also pretty cool (that is on Joshua Bardwell’s channel). Probably not as good as a Blackbox, but it’ll give you something to analyze if you have a crash, and if it is logging GPS it would tell you the last coordinate it had a split second before it hit the ground.

Question for you GAntonio: does your F3FC give you VFAS when the copter is not armed? All the boards I’ve seen only send telemetry over UART when the copter is armed. So when disarmed, it reads 0v. If you use SoftSerial you can apparently get telemetry when disarmed, but my current board doesn’t support SoftSerial. F3FC should (because the is a PWM5 and PWM6 pin header). Which way do you have it hooked up?

[GAntonjo]

@frank-debros: Thanks for your answer. I will have a look at the mentioned YT channels, Painless360 I know from before;-)

I have my X4R-SB connected to UART3 for SBUS, S.Port connected to UART2 TX. On UART1 TX I have my BlackBox logger. MSP is disabled for all these UARTS, as there is a separate port for MSP over the USB. LED strips are connected to LED port and all works as a charm so far. Since you mention it, you are probably right that the F3FC doesn’t transmit telemetry data over the UART while not armed. I didn’t understand why my Taranis didn’t show any data right after powering it on and not having armed the tricopter. (Edit: Now I tested agai, and my Taranis do indeed read Voltage and such from the F3FC before arming the Tri. My observation regarding not seeing the telemetry data was just after flashing the latest FW, before having done all reconfigurations).
I have not tested the softserial option, but it could be worth a try.

Anyway, I believe it will be nice to add some F3FC specific details here, with links to the relevant videos, so I will see what I find out through my own research. You are all welcomed to add in your findings on this thread;-)

[GAntonjo]

Status so far – these are the sensors I have visible on my Taranis (with current values for my 4S battery):

SENSOR   VALUE         ID
A2:      11.3V         27
SWR:     0-2           25
RSSI:    70dB-90dB     25
RxBt:    5.2V          25
VFAS:    16.50V        28
Curr:    0.2A          28
Alt:     1.8m          28
Fuel:    118%          28
Vspd:    0.0m/s        28
Hdg:     212.50 deg    28
AccX:    0.00g         28
AccY:    0.00g         28   
AccZ:    0.00g         28
Tmp1:    11011 deg C   28

From the ID, I can tell that all sensors with ID=28 are from the F3FC, the ones with ID=25 are from the X4R-SB receiver and A2 I don’t know from where it comes.

Fuel would be nice to understand, as it seems to count upwards from 0%, never stopping. I would like to be able to set it to 1800mAh at 100% and let it count down. I’m not sure how to do that, as the YouTube sources are only discussing real fuel, as in gas.

Edit: Found the ‘battery_capacity = 0’ in the CLI. Set it to 1800 (mAh) and saved. Let’s see if a flight reveals some correct fuel measurements.

[smiler]

You can also edit the Fuel entry in the Taranis and change the unit to mA and it will show mA consumed as reported from the board (you can validate it my watching the mA consumed value in the CF configurator).

[swissfreek]

A2 is the analog telemetry port. No need to use that unless you have a specific need for it, since you have SmartPort.

Interesting that you can see telemetry while disarmed. Maybe it’s just my particular board (Lumenier Lux)…? Looking forward to testing that out with my F3FCs when I get back home in a couple weeks.

For me, the only reason I would use i could get telemetry while disarmed would be if I ran out of available UART ports. So if I was running SmartPort AND BlackBox AND SBUS AND an OSD, then I would need a fourth UART, and in that case I would move telemetry to SoftSerial. It does come with some downsides, like on some boards you can’t use it in conjunction with LEDs, so it’s something to consider. Here’s a Painless360 video on SoftSerial -> https://youtu.be/lww3IZomb1g

Here’s a video on setting telemetry alarms -> https://youtu.be/Lq3JwnuCrys
It also talks about logging. Probably covers the majority of what you’ll be looking to do with telemetry.

Another good one on setting up telemetry -> https://youtu.be/i1Qf-lXNUxw (also a good channel to follow, he has a whole Taranis playlist)

This one shows telemetry set up with SoftSerial -> https://youtu.be/H47jCef6XlY

Hope that stuff helps.

[swissfreek]

Somehow here he gets telemetry without even having the fm flight pack connected. So it really must just be my particular model of board…

https://youtu.be/jYrc1vndb20

[GAntonjo]

Ok, so now I have 2 batteries emptied, both are 1800mAh batteries. I changed Fuel from % to mAh before the flights, so the numbers should be showing used mAh’s.

Battery    Fuel at end of flight  VFAS at end of flight   Charged afterwords 
1          1684 mAh               14.40 V                 1833 mAh
2          1436 mAh               14.90 V                 1537 mAh

Keeping the discharge at less than 80% should indicate landing at 1440 mAh, but the above shows that I did drain way too much off my 1st battery. I believe I will use a LiPo alarm on my MiniTri till I fully understand the telemetry of the F3FC.

[swissfreek]

Interesting. When I’ve had a current sensor in the past, it has usually read lower than actual consumption.

A LiPo alarm would be an imperfect solution, too, since in the first case you came in at 3.6v/cell, and in the second you came down at 3.72v/cell, neither of which is particularly low.

But, looking at the data, so far you are consistently consuming 10%ish more than your sensor is reading. If it were me, I’d probably fly a few more packs of varying flight times to get an idea of whether this scaling was linear, in other words, is it ALWAYS off by 10%? If so, then it should be possible to tweak the current sensor’s settings in CleanFlight so that it displays the correct value, and if you can’t do that, you can probably set the Taranis up to do it instead, or just know you have to come in at 1300mAh consumed instead of 1440.

[GAntonjo]

No that you mention the word “linear” it came to me that the Fuel seems to be consumed in a linear way, no matter how much Amperes are sucked out of the battery. Have a look at the attached screenshot from my Taranis telemetry log for battery 2 above. This tells me that there is something strange in the way Fuel sensor is collecting data, actually I would believe there is a fault in the algorithm.

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[swissfreek]

I would have assumed fuel would be an integral of the current graph (or something like that, my math is rusty), but that graph says it isn’t. I don’t know enough about what the fuel calculation is to speak intelligently on it. Will have to do more research.

[GAntonjo]

Ok, so I have not been able to fly since last post, but I have read up on the Fuel Sensor in CleanFlight/TriFlight. There actually was an OK explanation in the documentation)https://github.com/lkaino/Triflight/blob/master/docs/Battery.md 😉

Changed my current_meter_scale = 360 (default) to current_meter_scale = 335 in the GUI, based on calculations from the seen numbers. I probably could go to 330 to be on the safer side.

By the way. Even if the Fuel graph above looks linear, it really isn’t. Zooming in on seconds level reveals some variations as the Amps drawn changes.

[swissfreek]

Hey good research. I did some looking but couldn’t find anything on it. Go figure the answer is right in the Triflight documentation.

[bassmaniac]

Hi guys, I am glad that I found this thread. I am hoping for some help to get my telemetry working. I have recently built a V4 tri that flies really well but I am coming up short on the telemetry. This is my first attempt at s-port telemetry. I am using an original model Taranis TX ( running OpenTX 2.0.19) and a XSR TX. My connections are UART1=>sbus and UART2=>s-port.
I have included pictures of my clean flight configuration as well as what I see on my Taranis screen and tx telemetry setup. Can you guys see what is wrong and suggest a possible cure? This is causing me frustration !!??

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[bassmaniac]

Tx telemetry setup.

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