Extremely long post warning! It turned out much longer than I intended.
Some more details on this new version of the Tunnel Rat. The main reason I want servo tilt on it is so I can use it for poking around in old abandoned mines. This is a video clip from one specific trip where I would have greatly benefited from a drone. This was the third shaft I rigged, the first and second quickly turned into dead ends. If I could have sent down a drone I would have saved two days of rigging, abseiling and climbing back out, and I'd have saved on gas money because I had to come back and it's a bit of a drive.
At the video end you can see it opens up a bit. This is what it opens up to:
I'm at about 150 meters below surface and standing on top of a cliff, not sure how far it drops but I'm guessing the water level is at about 350 meters depth. Of coarse I want to continue exploring but the rigging to get down is going to be extremely laborsome so I want to poke around with a quad that has camera tilt and lights. After rigging for hours and abseiling down only to find out you missed a landing with 5 meters is pretty frustrating. That's where Tunnel Rat will pull it's weight.
I originally bought a DJI Mavic for this purpose but I've hated flying those things right from the start. Without GPS underground they go into ATTI mode and become really difficult to fly in tight underground spaces. I tried with the Mavic and was lucky I got away with only broken props! Now I only keep it in case I have to retrieve a quad stuck on a roof or similar.
I've played around with servos with the intention of building camera tilt but I didn't have any good ideas on how to do it until I saw LiPoFly's post on camera tilt which inspired me to get back at it: https://intofpv.com/t-next-project-walks...#pid197074
On to Tunnel Rat IV: For those interested, sorry I didn't take any pics of the assembly. I really didn't think it would be much to take pictures of, there is a 20x20 stack with a naked DJI Air Unit on top. I just moved over the stuff from previous beaten up frame and soldered on some wires with connectors to the FC:
The small one to the left is the USB connector (more on that later). The larger one with thicker wires for the servo with 5V, GND and PWM signal. The small one on the right is for the LED driver circuite with 5V, GND and two PINIOs with on/off signals. The larger one to the right is BAT+ and BAT- for powering the LEDs.
The CT30 frame can not support a downward titling camera in it's original position with the stock parts. So, before I started with 3D printing I built a small camera mount out of scraps from the old frame and used the original CT30 top plate. It looked a bit like this (I didn't bother with properly mounting it for this staged photo):
The vibrations in the camera with this mount where nasty so I had to scrap it. Also I had difficulties keeping the servo still, the plate it was on would move around and I couldn't figure out a good solution to keep it still without permanently gluing it to the frame. I had been putting off getting a 3D printer due to the steep learning curve but now I felt I could no longer avoid it so I sucked it up, got a second hand printer, downloaded Fusion 360 and watched a few youtube videos. Low and behold, I managed to design a top plate with extended camera arms and a slot for the servo to slide into, keeping it from moving around but still having it easy to replace. Because of the troubles I had with a reliable way to attach the movement wire to the camera I designed a small case for the Caddx Polar.
It works very well, the top plate utilizes the CT30 action camera soft mounts, camera is able to tilt down and is a extended out so I actually see something besides the frame when titling down.
I have utilized some parts from the previous frame. I hacked up TPU mount for the Crossfire antenna and used it here. This was before I started 3D printing. It's ugly as crap but hey, a small part of the Veyron frame lives on!
One thing I really liked about the Veyron frame was the solution for the USB connector. It is definitely something I am keeping because otherwise I would have to tear this thing apart just to get to the USB port on the FC. For now the connector cable position is temporary, I'll come up with a more perment solution for the actual USB connector. As it is now I just leave the USB C side on the USB cable and use the wire connector to connect/disconnect with Betaflight.
I've made all the wires with connectors fairly long so I can move stuff around a bit without having to take the frame apart. For now all cable positions are temporary, I'll have to make more permanent positions for them but I'd say this thing is still under development so now I like the flexibility.
The Betaflight setup was fairly straight forward. JB's video linked a couple of posts above was a massive help. His video is for BF4.3 and I've installed 4.4 so I had to include some options in the cloud build of BF. I had to include Servos and also the LED Strip options or else I was unable to free the LED_Strip resource for servo usage. First time I flashed I couldn't do anything with the LED_Strip, you have to have included it in the cloud build or you can't use the resource for something like a servo. Also the Servo tilt option must be enabled in the Configuration tab of Betaflight. Channel forwarding is supposed to work if you don't do this but this enabling servo tilt works fine for me so I haven't bothered with any channel forwarding.
Here are resources and commands I used for re-assigning LED_Strip output to servo control. First I found out what the LED_Strip resource is, then I free the LED_Strip resource and then assign the servo to it.
Then in the receiver tab I need to find out which of the AUX channels my slider on the radio is assigned to (in my case AUX 8), then set the corresponding channel (A8) in the servos tab.
The commands I used to re-assign SERIAL_RX 5 and SERIAL_TX 5 pads to PINIOs are:
Then in the modes tab I assign an AUX switch to modes USER1 and USER2.
That's it for now... a lot more written than I intended... did anyone actually make it this far? It's late and during the night someone (something?) usually logs on to my computer and screws up my posts, messing up spelling, grammar and so on... When I read in the morning there all these spelling and grammar issues that I swear where not there before so I usually end up editing the crap out of posts like this many many times in order to fix what whoever/whatever did to my post! Sorry in advance for that...
Some more details on this new version of the Tunnel Rat. The main reason I want servo tilt on it is so I can use it for poking around in old abandoned mines. This is a video clip from one specific trip where I would have greatly benefited from a drone. This was the third shaft I rigged, the first and second quickly turned into dead ends. If I could have sent down a drone I would have saved two days of rigging, abseiling and climbing back out, and I'd have saved on gas money because I had to come back and it's a bit of a drive.
At the video end you can see it opens up a bit. This is what it opens up to:
I'm at about 150 meters below surface and standing on top of a cliff, not sure how far it drops but I'm guessing the water level is at about 350 meters depth. Of coarse I want to continue exploring but the rigging to get down is going to be extremely laborsome so I want to poke around with a quad that has camera tilt and lights. After rigging for hours and abseiling down only to find out you missed a landing with 5 meters is pretty frustrating. That's where Tunnel Rat will pull it's weight.
I originally bought a DJI Mavic for this purpose but I've hated flying those things right from the start. Without GPS underground they go into ATTI mode and become really difficult to fly in tight underground spaces. I tried with the Mavic and was lucky I got away with only broken props! Now I only keep it in case I have to retrieve a quad stuck on a roof or similar.
I've played around with servos with the intention of building camera tilt but I didn't have any good ideas on how to do it until I saw LiPoFly's post on camera tilt which inspired me to get back at it: https://intofpv.com/t-next-project-walks...#pid197074
On to Tunnel Rat IV: For those interested, sorry I didn't take any pics of the assembly. I really didn't think it would be much to take pictures of, there is a 20x20 stack with a naked DJI Air Unit on top. I just moved over the stuff from previous beaten up frame and soldered on some wires with connectors to the FC:
The small one to the left is the USB connector (more on that later). The larger one with thicker wires for the servo with 5V, GND and PWM signal. The small one on the right is for the LED driver circuite with 5V, GND and two PINIOs with on/off signals. The larger one to the right is BAT+ and BAT- for powering the LEDs.
The CT30 frame can not support a downward titling camera in it's original position with the stock parts. So, before I started with 3D printing I built a small camera mount out of scraps from the old frame and used the original CT30 top plate. It looked a bit like this (I didn't bother with properly mounting it for this staged photo):
The vibrations in the camera with this mount where nasty so I had to scrap it. Also I had difficulties keeping the servo still, the plate it was on would move around and I couldn't figure out a good solution to keep it still without permanently gluing it to the frame. I had been putting off getting a 3D printer due to the steep learning curve but now I felt I could no longer avoid it so I sucked it up, got a second hand printer, downloaded Fusion 360 and watched a few youtube videos. Low and behold, I managed to design a top plate with extended camera arms and a slot for the servo to slide into, keeping it from moving around but still having it easy to replace. Because of the troubles I had with a reliable way to attach the movement wire to the camera I designed a small case for the Caddx Polar.
It works very well, the top plate utilizes the CT30 action camera soft mounts, camera is able to tilt down and is a extended out so I actually see something besides the frame when titling down.
I have utilized some parts from the previous frame. I hacked up TPU mount for the Crossfire antenna and used it here. This was before I started 3D printing. It's ugly as crap but hey, a small part of the Veyron frame lives on!
One thing I really liked about the Veyron frame was the solution for the USB connector. It is definitely something I am keeping because otherwise I would have to tear this thing apart just to get to the USB port on the FC. For now the connector cable position is temporary, I'll come up with a more perment solution for the actual USB connector. As it is now I just leave the USB C side on the USB cable and use the wire connector to connect/disconnect with Betaflight.
I've made all the wires with connectors fairly long so I can move stuff around a bit without having to take the frame apart. For now all cable positions are temporary, I'll have to make more permanent positions for them but I'd say this thing is still under development so now I like the flexibility.
The Betaflight setup was fairly straight forward. JB's video linked a couple of posts above was a massive help. His video is for BF4.3 and I've installed 4.4 so I had to include some options in the cloud build of BF. I had to include Servos and also the LED Strip options or else I was unable to free the LED_Strip resource for servo usage. First time I flashed I couldn't do anything with the LED_Strip, you have to have included it in the cloud build or you can't use the resource for something like a servo. Also the Servo tilt option must be enabled in the Configuration tab of Betaflight. Channel forwarding is supposed to work if you don't do this but this enabling servo tilt works fine for me so I haven't bothered with any channel forwarding.
Here are resources and commands I used for re-assigning LED_Strip output to servo control. First I found out what the LED_Strip resource is, then I free the LED_Strip resource and then assign the servo to it.
Code:
# resource
resource LED_STRIP 1 B03
# resource LED_STRIP 1 none
Resource is freed
# resource SERVO 1 B03
Resource is set to B03
Then in the receiver tab I need to find out which of the AUX channels my slider on the radio is assigned to (in my case AUX 8), then set the corresponding channel (A8) in the servos tab.
The commands I used to re-assign SERIAL_RX 5 and SERIAL_TX 5 pads to PINIOs are:
Code:
# resource
resource SERIAL_TX 5 C12
resource SERIAL_RX 5 D02
# resource SERIAL_TX 5 none
Resource is freed
# resource SERIAL_RX 5 none
Resource is freed
# set pinio_box = 0,40,41,255
pinio_box = 0,40,41,255
Array length: 4
Default value: 0,255,255,255
# resource pinio 2 d02
Resource is set to D02
# resource pinio 3 c12
Resource is set to C12
Then in the modes tab I assign an AUX switch to modes USER1 and USER2.
That's it for now... a lot more written than I intended... did anyone actually make it this far? It's late and during the night someone (something?) usually logs on to my computer and screws up my posts, messing up spelling, grammar and so on... When I read in the morning there all these spelling and grammar issues that I swear where not there before so I usually end up editing the crap out of posts like this many many times in order to fix what whoever/whatever did to my post! Sorry in advance for that...