Tricopter LR – Firmware (Triflight, iNav)?

[jihlein]

The servo pwm wiring for the KakuteF4V2 is the same for Dronin and inav, connect the pwm signal to the pad labeled led. This won’t change. Feedback wire goes to pad labeled rsi. It is not used in inav, and is referred to as adc2 when setting up the Triflight function on Dronin.

Note that inav will only work if you use the modified binary file I posted earlier in this thread.

[jihlein]

Some slow progress. All the parts are here now, and installed, so I can start wiring. I decided to mount the VTX on the top of the plate, leaving room in the middle for a carrier board that will hold the XSR-SB receiver. So here’s more photo’s detailing the component installation.

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[jihlein]

Some dRonin targets support a very detailed graphical OSD, with a fairly complete menu system to help setup and monitor various subsystems. The KakuteF4V2, however, has a character based OSD. I’ve taken some of the more useful menus, and modified them to work with the character based OSD. I need to get my Tri LR wiring complete so I can finish the testing, but here’s a sample of the menus so far. The top level menu is display while the system is disarmed. Once the disarmed state is left, the normal flight overlay is displayed. This could/might be expanded to PID values, but for now, I’m going to stick with these 3 sub menus for now.

I believe this is similar to the BetaFlight OSD.

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[swissfreek]

Would you be willing/able to post the Mac GCS you built? Want to see if I can run it. The other versions that are posted crash on startup.

[jihlein]

I just tried to create an installer. But even though I can build, the installer generation is now throwing an error. Something else to look into…….

[jihlein]

@Swissfreek – I think I got my MACOS problems solved. Well at least it built an installer. Please try this:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Am7KDquQANJl7BqJZOTh_j-zBIgd

The GCS that was built runs on my Mac. This is my latest build, with the OSD menus. They are not complete, some of the page formats will need updating. The build is safe to fly, but proceed with care as always.

[swissfreek]

Looks like that might be the link to the Windows installer.

[jihlein]

Sometimes I shouldn’t be behind a keyboard…..

Try this one:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!Am7KDquQANJl7BqJZOTh_j-zBIgd

[swissfreek]

Haha, no worries, I know the feeling.

Now we’re cooking with gas! It loads, so I’m flashing and setting up now. Should be able to give it a little flying time later today. Thanks for this, man!

[oxivanisher]

I love to see the progress here! Sadly, I had no time to build mine further but with any luck, I can continue today. @jihlein thanks for the explanation for the servo. 🙂

[swissfreek]

My tail was responding backwards, and it took me a little while to remember how to fix that. Not sure what I mucked up in the config to get that wrong, but anyway. Once I got that sorted and turned one of my busted 4S 5200 packs into a functional 3S 5200 pack, I didn’t have time to go fly and autotune. Tomorrow, I swear.

I kind of like how the menu is there whenever the copter is unarmed. I assume that if I try to arm while a flag is tripped (like no GPS), it will do something to let me know in the goggles? If not, that would be nice.

But, speaking of the OSD, I can’t seem to find the tab in the GCS to change the settings of where everything is in the OSD… Or does it need to be done manually at the moment? There used to be a page back in the day.

[jihlein]

@swissfreek wrote:

“I kind of like how the menu is there whenever the copter is unarmed”

I’m not 100% sure I like this, but it was easy for initial testing. I finally found some info on the Betaflight OSD, and it takes something like mid throttle-yaw left-pitch forward while unarmed to bring up the menu. I coded up a slimmer version of this, mid throttle-yaw left while unarmed to display the menu, mid throttle-yaw right while unarmed to hide the menu. Going to the armed state overrides all this and hides the menu. I’ve not committed this to the baseline work yet.

“I assume that if I try to arm while a flag is tripped (like no GPS), it will do something to let me know in the goggles?”

Not at the moment. This is why I like being able to select/de-select the menu as just described. But that leads to the thought that maybe an abbreviated System health menu is in order, that displays the status of the common fault areas (whatever they may be).

“Or does it need to be done manually at the moment?”

Must be done manually thru the CharOnScreenDisplaySettings object. There is a setup page for the graphical OSD used on other boards, but not the character based version. That’s not likely to change, unless there is someone who can pick up that task, I don’t understand the GCS programming…….

So here’s a list of random questions for the character based OSD:

1)Display menu when ever unarmed, or add the throttle/yaw stick switch to display/hide menu when unarmed?
2)System Health menu necessary? If so, which subsystems? Keep in mind the vehicle should be fully configured by the time we are using this, it’s more for finding things that might have failed/broke.
3)When leaving the menu system and then returning, should it return to the top level menu, or where you previously left off?

Note that many of the existing pages are incomplete. I’ve yet to get the full system up with a GPS and all the other system components to get the full menu displays (many of the pages look for valid data, and if they don’t find any, declutter the display).

You’re the first to see this live…..

Any and all feedback welcome.

[swissfreek]

Yeah, at first I was like ehhh, not sure how I feel about this. But I could see the logic.

1) I think doing it the way everyone else does it would be more consistent (stick movement to enable the menu). It took me a while to think “hmm, maybe I should just try arming” at first, because I couldn’t find the “Exit” button. But then I thought it wasn’t a bad concept. But like I said, I think consistency is worthwhile unless ir provides a tangible benefit, and in this case it’s the opposite, because you can’t see the system status via the OSD (number of sats, calibration info, mode before arming, etc.). On the TBS OSDs, getting into the menu is actually holding left yaw at min throttle. I always preferred that to the Betaflight style, because if you have the goggles on it’s a little harder to know when you’re at mid throttle. Maybe both sticks down and out? Don’t want to make it too easy, but the tactile aspect of it is important since you can’t actually see (usually).

2) I don’t think so. It’s not something I would go into the menu for. What I want to know is stuff that will prevent me from arming (like, I still need to wait on GPS, or aircraft not level enough, etc.). What I don’t want is to have to flip the switch, nope didn’t arm, flip it again, nope still not, flip it again, ah that time it armed. Especially since with dRonin by default you have to wait a second to see if the props start spinning. I have a beeper installed but still have to work on the settings to make it actually yell at me when there’s an arming flag active. Anyway, having the error message on the OSD solves this issue for me, especially if it’s a big flashing screen when I flip the switch that says “CANNOT ARM! NO GPS FIX!” or something like that.

3) I think top menu. The only time I’d want to go back to the same menu is if I were tuning, and since we have autotune I doubt that will be a very common task.

[oxivanisher]

I installed dRonin as a first solution. I like to try the “triflight” magic. 😉
But since I have a broken ESC, I have to wait some days until I can test it out. 🙁

I was able to configure the 220 GPS, Voltage meter, crossfire and so on. It was a little fiddly at first (the connection from dRonin GCS and the computer failed often), but I finally got it to work and now it seems pretty stable. I think the GPS made problems until I configured the correct UART and protocol.

But I can not see the “Tailtune” option in the flight modes as described in Davids video [0]. Also I found no way to use the additional accessory switch and I do not know if telemetry down link is even possible with crossfire (does Mavlink help?). Also it seems that dRonin does not support smart audio to configure your VTX. I don’t think the BF Lua scripts will be working anyways. 😉 The best way will probably be to use one of the XFRX pins and use SA directly, if this is possible. I think it should be, but I never really tried this before.

I used the PC version from this link [1].

At first glance, it seems that there is not much going on in the dRonin development. But the repo [2] is pretty active at the moment for the amount of people working on it! I hope that the new version(s) will be fully supporting the tricopter and not requiring another “special release” [1] which is not linked on the official dRonin page.

All in all, I am really happy to have ordered a LR and can’t wait to take it out for a spin. 😀

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZQvEJu7vG4
[1] https://rcexplorer.se/forums/topic/dronin-for-tricopters-trironin/
[2] https://github.com/d-ronin/dRonin

[swissfreek]

Yeah, dRonin on the whole is pretty quiet these days, but @jihlein is carrying the torch for us tricopter fans, and he’s adding new features as we speak.

TailTune is called ServoCal now. When the video was made it was before the change.

You will get telemetry via CrossFire.

As for VTX control, I believe John is in the process of adding that, but if not (or at least in the meantime), your best bet is to use direct control via CrossFire to the VTX. My LR has 1.3, so control isn’t an option anyway. Not that it matters, in the US there’s only two 1.3GHz channels, not hard to manage with a single button… 😉

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