Hi gang! While on a recent trip to our R&D facilities in Victoria, Canada, I had the chance to dust off an old senior design group project that some of our engineers developed - a Winch! While we hope to develop this into a product eventually, the bit of work I did upgrading the control system to u…

Awesome post @tony-white - thanks for sharing! :smiley: Just commenting to add that for people who are interested, there is: some existing ArduPilot documentation around Lua scripting, as well as a dedicated forum category for Lua scripting in the more general ArduPilot forum

Cool design! I’m tinkering with a similar project right now, starting with electric anchor winches but their minimum radius is a bit small. Is your drum a custom design?

Hi @alloy55 - Thanks! The drum is indeed a custom 3D printed component. Depending on the cable you use, a smaller drum might be ok!

Hi @alloy55 and @tony-white , I really love this winch concept! Have you had the opportunity to work on it any further since your last updates? Also, would it be possible to share the hardware design files (e.g., drum and gear model, mechanical drawings, or any build notes) so that the community c…

Hello @tony-white I am also interested in creating a similar setup. I am wondering if you can provide any information on the components you have used? Thanks in advance.

Hi @tony-white Is the script meant only for autonomous use? I would like to add a winch to my USV that has BR products for the navigation system. I have a winch that is run by a Digilent DMC 60 which is controlled by PWM inputs. Is this something that I could connect to the Navigator and run man…

Hi @SweUSV - That script is meant for use in auto mode, switching to loiter mode and doing stuff with a winch via PWM output, which would be compatible with your ESC. If you’re looking to just manually control an output channel, to winch out and in, you could do that with a simple control in Cockp…

Hi @tony-white - I’m not quite sure I follow, could you please clarify? We are unfortunately not using Cockpit and do not have plans to change as the USV works as intended at the moment. Would it be possible to use BlueOS to program the use of a winch or would this only be possible in Cockpit?

Hi @SweUSV - Apologies - I was jumping to the idea of you manually controlling your servo via the GCS software. This is also possible to do in QGC, but definitely more of a hassle . If you want things to happen with the winch at waypoints, automatically, than the lua script related to winch contro…

Thanks for the clarification @tony-white . The QGC solution definitely seems like it is a bit of a hassle but I already have someone in mind that may be able to figure it out for me. Thanks for the input.

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Controlling external devices with Lua Scripts on Ardurover (BlueBoat Winch!)

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Software

Controlling external devices with Lua Scripts on Ardurover (BlueBoat Winch!)

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