-
Programming ESP8266 with Arduino IDE
One of the best things about ESP8266 ESP-01 WiFi modules is that they can be programmedusing popular and well known Arduino IDE and act as stand alone board with WiFicapabilities. Thanks to ESP8266 group process of integrating ESP8266 and Arduino IDEis pretty simple. First step is to add http://arduino.esp8266.com/stable/package_esp8266com_index.json to Additional Boards Manager URLs in…
-
Using PCA9685 with INAV
One of the hardware limitations of flight controllers that usually multirotor users ignores is a number of PWM outputs. To fly a quadcopter you need “only” 4 PWM outputs. Since most FCs have 6 outputs and 90% of multirotors are quadcopters, there is no problem. In case of airplanes, this is not that simple. 6…
-
SmartPort inverter for F4 flight controllers
While STM32F4 family processors installed in newest flight controllers are superior to STM32F3 (and F1 of course) in terms of raw speed, they are inferior to F3 family in terms of IO handling capabilities. For example, F4 family is not equipped with UART port inverters. There is an S.BUS inverter, but not a SmartPort inverter.…
-
INAV: Launch mode video tutorial
One of the best new features of INAV 1.4 was Launch assistant mode (NAV LAUNCH). It greatly simplified the process of hand launching a fixed wing. All you had to do was to throw it into the air. INAV detected the throw, engaged motor(s) and stabilized flight and kept constant climb rate in the initial…
-
INAV: how to setup asynchronous gyro
Together with version 1.4, INAV introduced asynchronous gyroscope processing. What is async gyro and why it is useful to have it, you can read here. In short worlds: data from gyroscope is read and filtered faster than PID controller updates motor and servo output. When it is worth to enable asynchronous processing In general, async…
-
Simplest hardware inverter for flight controller
Together with increasing popularity of STM32F4 flight controllers, telemetry became hard topic again. Why? Most popular telemetry protocols, SmartPort and FrSky telemetry , requires inverted signal. Zero becomes one, one becomes zero. In case on STM32F3 that was not a big problem. Those CPUs have built in inverters. STM32F1 and STM32F4 does not. So, if…
-
Flip32 F4 and Airbot F4 Software Serial
When STM32F4 based flight controllers made its way to the world of MultiWii derivatives (Cleanflight and whole family), all I think all developers assumed that SoftwareSerial feature will not be needed on those boards. Why it should be? STM32F4 has enough hardware UARTs to satisfy everyones needs. Unfortunately, live had it’s own point of view…
-
INAV Advanced Accelerometer Calibration: why and how
One of the most often forgotten tasks required to bring the most of INAV, is good accelerometer calibration. Why? While flight controller software like Cleanfligth and Betaflight use accelerometer only to compute UAV’s body inclination (Angle and Horizon modes as well as artificial horizon), INAV uses it also for position estimation. Cleanfligt has to only…
-
Yaw unstable at full throttle
Last weekend I’ve experienced quite serious problem with Reptile X4R 220 racing quadcopter: on full throttle quad was loosing stability. At first, it was starting to drift yaw to the right. Then, if throttle was not lowered, roll and pitch was also becoming unstable and quad was doing crazy things in the air. I do…