Other flight controllers

[hsamuels]

Oh, that’s unfortunate.

[Sven]

Fun fact about the prop direction. If you use 3 CW props (or 3 CCW props) the servo will have to “correct” more, meaning that the rear motor will have to work a tiny bit harder, as you’ll have less lift directly pointing down, and some of the thrust (it’s trust vectoring) will instead be used to control yaw. Now I don’t think you’ll loose much in a tri, but on full blown helicopters up to 30% of the total motor output will have to be directed towards the tail rotor, but now we’re talking a perfectly centered main rotor torque, and that’s a lot more then what you’ll get in these smaller (and offset) torque generating motors.

So you’ll probably get a few more seconds worth of flying time if you use 2 CW and 1 CCW prop, but we’re talking margins (I think, but I’m not an expert)

That’s my 2 cents, have a good one 😉

[hsamuels]

I’m trying to connect to the Swift32 FCB from my Mac. I have the Cleanflight Chrome app, and the only available ports on the top left pulldown list are other things like Bluetooth devices that I recognize.

I installed SiLabsUSBDriverDisk.dmg, and also FTDIUSBSerialDriver_v2_2_18. The pulldown list in Cleanflight now includes

/dev/cu/SLAB_USBtoUART
/dev/tty/SLAB_USBtoUART

Neither of which works. Cleanflight times out after 10 seconds.

Suggestions?

[Terje]

First time you use a board in Baseflight/Cleanflight you must flash it with the firmware before you can connect to it (I know it sounds backwards) use the firmware flasher and load the approritate firmware(Naze32?)

[hsamuels]

Wow, Terje, that was fast, and that was easy. Thank you!

Today I have two tasks – set up the new controller, and put the tricopter back together after having crashed it this morning. 🙁

[hsamuels]

I calibrated the accelerometer and magnetometer, and am enjoying watching the virtual quadcopter mimic the motions of the FCB.

[Terje]

Looking forward to hear about your experiences with the controller 🙂

[rue]

While still waiting for my motors to arrive I decided to do a little workbench setup of my Naze32 and the frsky X8R – I initially intended to hook those two up with SBUS + telemetry via s.port. Turns out that at the moment this combination is not possible since both ports need a hardware UART due the the >19200 baudrate and one of them has to be dedicated to CLI. There is an experimental branch by Frank Zhao that enables sharing UART1 but it also needs HW modifications: https://github.com/frank26080115/cle…ing-Smart-Port

For the time being I decided to stay with just the SBUS and also this induced a little learning – the signal from the X8S needs to be inverted (stated all over the net but I missed this) and so I decided to build a little inverter with stuff I have in the drawer (alternative is to use a cheap inverter cable from HK) The home-brewn connection works nice and if anyone is interessted, let me know.

[rue]

Sorry – messed up the link. Here it comes again: https://github.com/frank26080115/cleanflight/wiki/Using-Smart-Port

[hsamuels]

Boy, it’s easy to end up getting lost in the forums looking for an answer with Cleanflight!

In any case, the Naze32 is working with DSM (Spectrum) receiver. The next step is to use it with a satellite receiver instead, so that I don’t need a wire per channel, and also to free up ports for GPS, etc.

I bound the satellite by plugging it into a regular receiver with a satellite port, and bound both of them to the transmitter. Then I removed the satellite and plugged it into the Naze32.

In Cleanflight, no matter how many times I select RX_SERIAL on the configuration tab, the selection disappears after save and reboot. I tried both SPEKTRUM1024 and SPEKTRUM2048.

In the CLI (command line interface) I tried

feature rx_serial
save

Same result – none of the receiver options are highlighted.

In both cases, issuing ‘dump’ in the CLI returns ‘feature -rx_serial’

Are there other settings required to get the board to talk to a satellite receiver?

[hsamuels]

I found a couple of other settings in the documentation serial.md.

feature -RX_PARALLEL_PWM
feature RX_SERIAL
set serialrx_provider = 0
set serial_port_2_scenario = 3
save

Now RX_SERIAL is highlighted in the configuration tab. But the receiver tab shows no response to any input – all channels are locked at 1500.

[rue]

Not sure if the order is important when you use the CLI commands – I have been able to configure the SBUS just through the GUI. Have you assigned UART2 SerialRX in the ports tab before configuring the protokoll in the subsequent tab?

[rue]

Just had a look at the Serial documentation – your sequence looks good. One thing regarding serialrx_provider: value 0 (as you chose) is for Spektrum1024 protocol, value 1 for the Spektrum2048 variant. Have you tried the second option via CLI?

[hsamuels]

Thanks, Rue. I’ve tried both 1024 and 2048, both from the CLI and the GUI. No dice.

Time to dive into the forums…

[hsamuels]

Just to be sure, the satellite receiver LED should be solid to indicate that it is bound to my transmitter, right?

And the power to the satellite receiver should come from the 3.3V pad on the Naze32 rather than the 5V supplied by the second pin from the top on the receiver connector, right?

[Author]

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