tirsdag den 31. december 2013

MultiWii Pro controller

Being a newbie, it took quite a while to figure out the cabling required to make this all work, i originally had a Crius all in one Pro version 2.0 that i bought from unmannedtech.co.uk, the documentation was very sparse and much of it was DIY, so i ended up shorting the board as i fed voltage at a wrong connection and one of the copper threads burnt out, i eventually ordered a new one from rctimer.com


but that got stuck in the postal office somewhere in singapore, not wanting to wait another month i then ordered a HK MultiWii pro, i later repaired the broken board by soldering a wire between the burnt out circuit making the board usable again, and a month later the new Crius board arrived, so i now have flight controllers for three quads. In this section i will look at my cabling, as i mentioned i am no expert in this field, this is plain DIY and many things can be done differently, so let me know if thats the case.

As in the above picture the top section of the board is used to mount the motors and the Gimbal. Pin 44is the pitch of the gimbal and pin 45 is the roll of the gimbal. I only connected the signal cable of both gimbals as i am currently working a separate powering for the Gimbal to avoid brown outs, more on that later, i have not yet put shrink tube nor a pin connector still waiting for it to arrive.



Pins D2 through to PinD6 are used to connect the motors, if you are making a Hexacopter pins D7 and 8 would be used as well, but since this is a quad i am only using 2 to 6. Here i connected the signal cable from the ESC only, this has to be connected on the pin closest to the white arrow. Ok time for new year party back later

Ok happy new to you all, hope you all had a fantastic evening and a great party. Well mine was not to bad, though i left the partying out, the evening was great.

Pin 9 and 10 I used for connecting the HC-SR04 sonar distance sensor more on that later.
Connecting the motors on the copter all depends on what you are building in my case i have an X frame quad so i downloaded the manual from HK and got the setup from there.

I placed the quad in the flying direction with the arrow pointing forward and found the equivelant setup, so in my case D2 on the MultiWii board i placed the left front motor, D3 the back right motor, D4 the front right motor and D5 the back left motor. I only used the signal cable from each ESC as i used a seperate UBEC to power my system.

After i accidently shorted my ESC, I cut the positive and ground wire off leaving only the signal wire, the ESC still functions in powering and regulating the motor. 

On the otherside of the MultiWII pro, i connected the signal cables to my reciever.
here my story is the same as before i only need to connect the signal wire (most inner rail where the green cable is connected and not the + and ground rails as my reciever is also powered by my UBEC. The thing that i so far have learnt is that i had to search many sites and read many articles before finding out how to have it all down correctly, for instance my reciever uses the terminology "Throttle, Alieron, Elevator, Rudder", the Crius AIOP (all in one pro) uses the terminolgy "Throttle, Roll, Pitch and Yaw", now it actually took some time to find the out which was which, in actual fact for a moment i was wondering wether google had gone offline. Anyway for all of you, like me who can´t master the power of seaching in Google, Roll is Alieron, Pitch is Elevator and Yaw is Rudder, i later found out that the Alieron, elevator and rudder terminolgy is used for RC planes and the counter when building multi-rotors.

Back to the connecting the reciever and HK MultiWii, when i downloaded the official documentation off Hobbykings site i noticed a slight differance, i am not actually sure which revision my board is, but the official documentation states that the outer pin is the signal cable and the inner pin is the GND, this is not correct, the INNER rail is the signal, so just one more reason to gret confused. I connected my reciever with the corresponding cables. The top row on my reciever is the signal pins, my reciever is powered using a UBEC on the BATT/BIND this port i originally used to pair my reciever and transmitter, apart from that i use it to power the Rx, the middle rail has the + connection and the bottle rail has the GND.

Throttle on the signal pin of the reciever to A8 on the HK MultiWii
Alieron/roll on the signal pin of the reciever  A9 on the HK MultiWii
Elevator/Pitch on the signal pin of the reciever A10 on the HK MultWii
Rudd/Yaw on the signal pin of the reciever A11 on the HK multiWii

The Gear and the Aux1,  i believe i connected to get some extra functions out of my transmitter, but not sure have to check out why.

Well time for some live championshipcommentary Reading vs. Forest COYR
Halford does it again!!!




4 kommentarer:

  1. Hi Peter
    fascinating to find out someone else has nearly the same configuration of flight controller, frame and motors as oneself.
    Hope everything is working out in Denmark and your quad is still in one piece.

    May I ask a question?
    What software are you running on your Multiwii Pro?
    I'm currently using Megapirate NG, but I haven't found a way to get my servo driven gimbal running with this firmware.

    Greetings from Heidelberg (germany),
    Sebastian

    SvarSlet
  2. Well my Multiwii Pro got buggered after flying it in wet conditions, i think one of the sensors (baro) failed, so i changed it to a Crius All in One Pro mounted, i was using the MegapiratesNG 2.9 firmware and it worked fine with the gimbal, what i did notice was there are two connectors on the board that state Camera Pitch/Camera Roll, one is under the motor mounts headers D44/D45/D46 and the other is under the Reciever headers A14/A15, please make sure you mount it on D44/D45 if it is a two axis gimbal.

    SvarSlet
  3. Hi Peter

    Thank you very much for the update.
    I'm currently using MPNG 3.1 beta.
    3.0.1 didn't work out at the beginning, so I skipped it.

    Will have to use "try and error" for getting my gimbal to work.
    In the most recent APM Planer you can't choose pins for 44/45 for gimbal control. Haven't found a work around yet.
    Or maybe I will try to switch to MultiWii Firmware.

    SvarSlet
  4. Well i would opt for this http://www.ebay.com/itm/DJI-Phantom-Gopro-2-3-CNC-Metal-Brushless-Camera-Gimbal-w-Motors-Controller-S-/281270854367 bought one after the frame on my work around gimbal broke, has the advantage that it is more sturdy, the frame is alu, so less prone to damage, it has its own controller that gives you a super smooth picture, PID values can be adjusted via usb and controller software on the downside it weighs a lot more so more power needed, was going to make a blog article on this Gimbal

    SvarSlet