My current hardware provides me with two OSD options. 

1) Runcam Swift 2 RR
2) PDB - Mateksys HUBOSD with STOSD8

I'm currently making use of the Runcam OSD (was just more convenient at the time) which shows me VBAT, but no current data etc. I've been toying with the idea of switching to the PDB OSD, but do not really know what benefit I would be getting by doing this? What are the reasons for wanting to see current draw?

Seeing instantaneous current draw isn't that interesting, but you can instead see how much battery power has been used in terms of mA/h. This is a much better metric than battery voltage to judge when it is time to land.

So, if you have a current sensor and you have calibrated it so that it is accurate, you will be able to see when you have used 80% of the battery's capacity which is when you should land.

(10-Jan-2018, 10:15 AM)unseen Wrote: Seeing instantaneous current draw isn't that interesting, but you can instead see how much battery power has been used in terms of mA/h. This is a much better metric than battery voltage to judge when it is time to land.

So, if you have a current sensor and you have calibrated it so that it is accurate, you will be able to see when you have used 80% of the battery's capacity which is when you should land.

Thanks! mA/h monitoring makes sense. I see Oscar has an article on this and the calibration process. Might be worth switching.

Unrelated to the topic, but something I want to make sure of:

Is looks like STOSD8 now also supports RSSI, which is something I am definitely interested in. This should be as simple as wiring up the RSSI pad on my X4RSB to the RSSI pad on my HUBOSD8-SE, right? As far as I can establish both are PWM.

(10-Jan-2018, 10:39 AM)xcalibur Wrote: Thanks! mA/h monitoring makes sense. I see Oscar has an article on this and the calibration process. Might be worth switching.

Unrelated to the topic, but something I want to make sure of:

Is looks like STOSD8 now also supports RSSI, which is something I am definitely interested in. This should be as simple as wiring up the RSSI pad on my X4RSB to the RSSI pad on my HUBOSD8-SE, right? As far as I can establish both are PWM.

The X4RSB outputs a PWM RSSI signal and the HUBOSD8-SE expects a PWM RSSI input.

This is actually the best way of monitoring RSSI. If you use the Taranis to report RSSI, the data has to be sent back to the Taranis over the telemetry link from the receiver. Given that the receiver is going to have more and more trouble transmitting a signal back to the radio over longer distances, having RSSI decoded by the flight controller and displayed on your OSD is going to be more reliable.

I'm all for reliability. Having both my OSD and Taranis reporting and monitoring is a plus! Done, I'm switching. Thanks for the great feedback unseen.