Common Flight Controller Peripherals
So you've got your aircraft flying, and you want to hook other stuff to it? OK.
dRonin flight controllers have ports allowing you to connect a wide variety of "stuff" to it. This page offers a brief treatment of what you might attach and how.
Note for F1 flight controllers...
Ensure that the autotune module is turned off before enabling any other modules on F1 flight controllers (like Naze32 or CC3D). The STM32F103 microprocessor has limited memory and it is unable to successfully start up with autotune and other modules enabled at the same time.
Battery monitoring
dRonin can monitor battery voltage, current, and expected remaining life, and prevent arming when a low battery is attached. This battery data can also be reported over an on-screen display or radio receiver telemetry.
Most flight controllers have voltage and current sense pins, which can be used with an external battery monitoring board like the UberDistro, AmpWings, or AttoPilot.
After reading the documentation for your battery monitoring board, and attaching the sensor's current and voltage sense leads to the flight controller's ADC lines, enable the battery module on the modules pane in GCS.
See this wiki page for additional details.
Radio receiver telemetry
dRonin supports sending telemetry data to FrSky and other radios. Information about the flight, such as remaining battery, flight mode, position, and attitude can then be displayed on a Taranis.
There are a few different radio telemetry protocols (Wiki documentation is linked):
- FrSky Sensor Hub (D8) telemetry used by many FrSky receivers (D4R-II, etc).
- FrSky Smart Port (D16) telemetry used by advanced FrSky receivers (X4R-SB, X8R, etc)
- Graupner HoTT telemetry
dRonin also speaks these protocols which are not typically used for receiver telemetry
- MSP (used for on-screen display / MWOSD)
- UAVTalk (the protocol used to speak to GCS)
- Mavlink (used for legacy on-screen display)
To use a telemetry protocol, first wire it to a flight controller port. On STM32F3, you can usually wire the telemetry wires directly to the port. On other flight controllers, an inverter is generally required. Then, configure the specific port on the hardware pane to the protocol, save, and reset your flight controller.
External on-screen display
It's recommended that you use MWOSD. MWOSD is an on-screen display that runs on multiple types of hardware, including MiniMOSD, Micro-MiniMOSD, and OSDoge.
MWOSD speaks a protocol called Multiwii Serial Protocol (MSP), that dRonin also supports. MSP was introduced by MultiWii and is also used by Baseflight and Cleanflight.
MWOSD and Naze32
Naze32 has limited serial ports and as a result there are some nuances to using MWOSD. Detailed instructions on using MWOSD with Naze32 are on the Using Naze32 page.
First, install MWOSD onto your OSD (the procedure for this is beyond the scope of this documentation) and wire the video signals through the OSD. Next, go to the hardware pane in GCS. Set the specific port on the hardware pane to "MSP", save, and reset the flight controller.
With luck, information on flight status is now on the on-screen display!
Gimbals and camera pointing
XXX TODO
Bluetooth or data radios
XXX TODO
OpenLog
XXX TODO
GPS and external compass
XXX TODO
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