We have just started using a pixhawk in combination with Ardusub in our BlueROV.
We have uploaded the latest Ardusub firmware to our PX4 trough the Qgroundcontrol sofware
We haven’t been able to perform the radio calibration. Looking at this forum the main solution for this problems is to disable the arm check. Disabling it seems to have no effect so the arm check is still enabled. Doen anyone have a sugestion on either completing the radio calibration or disabling the arm check.
I assume that you are not using a RPi to communicate with the Pixhawk and are communicating directly with Pixhawk over the telemetry connection with QGC?
If that is the case, we found that we had to increase the Pilot Input Gain to 100% (the default is 50%), after calibrating the gamepad joysticks with QGC, to be able to complete the R/C calibration using QGC.
We are running ArduSub on a BBBMINI and we assigned Gain Increase (42) to Button A on the XBox 360 gamepad and Gain Decrease (43) to Button X on the XBox 360 gamepad.
Hope that this might give you some clue as to the reason you are having a problem with your R/C calibration.
The gain can be changed whether you are armed or not. The current gain prints in the “info window” that can be seen by clicking the horn-shaped icon in the top bar.
I believe it should be possible to disable the pre-arm check so that radio calibration is not necessary. The radio section will still show as red on the sidebar, but it should not produce any warnings. I haven’t checked this myself because I usually calibrate the radio to get the red icon to go away in QGC.
I too am having issues getting the Radio to Calibrate. Either connected via MavLink, or USB. When the joystick controls are moved, the channel monitor shows only slight movement, like maybe 25%.
Have you tried changing the gain to 100%? Even at 100%, they usually only move about 50-60% in each direction, which is normal.
For everyone, what’s the preferred way to address this?
Remove radio calibration from QGroundControl for ArduSub (then you couldn’t use an RC radio in any situation).
Make default gain 100% to that this is more intuitive.
Implement gain in a different fashion. Right now the gain scales the raw RC inputs that are controlling the “radio” during calibration. We could instead apply the gain later. The easiest place would be in the AP_Motors library.
I’m going to post this on Gitter as well to see what all developers think.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘gain’ I did a Parameter search for ‘gain’, and found only ‘ATC_RAT_x’ I tried to set those to 100%, but no change in the movement in the 'Radio" calibration section. With the Radio section in a Red state, I cannot adjust the Flight Modes.
Its been a bit frustrating, as I can’t get the video streamer to display on the QGC either. I see from Wireshark, the RPI is sending packets to port 5600, and I’ve seen it may be port 5000?
I apologize for not explaining. The gain is not a parameter but rather is a variable controlled by the joystick buttons “Gain Increase” and “Gain Decrease”. The gain is like a control factor. At 50% gain, then vehicle will be slow and smooth. At 100% gain, it will be much faster and move more sharply.
To set gain to 100%, please assign a joystick button to “Gain Increase” and then press it twice to increase gain to 100%. You can view the current gain in the “Info” window by clicking on the horn icon in the top bar of QGC.
To get video displaying in QGC, the video stream needs to be sent to port 5600.
Thanks for your feedback on this. It helps us to improve the software and instructions.
Now I’m just down to getting the Aux channels (camera tilt/lights, and I’m hoping for a third channel to control the gripper) to work with the Logitech controller, and video streaming.
I am currently testing the setup (dry) and all seems to be functioning ok. We will start the wet test hopefully today.
There is just one thing. When I disarm the system thruster number 5 starts running at full speed. The rest of the thrusters are disarmed. The only way to stop the thruster from running is to disconnect the power to the ESC’s. When I reconnect the power everything is ok again. Any suggestions what might be wrong?
That’s interesting. I haven’t seen that behavior before. Can you please check in the “MAVlink Inspector”, which can be accessed from the “Widgets” menu, and see if the servo output for channel 5 is something other than 1500? Try this before and after arming.
After a night of testing I am strugling a bit to get the controls right. Let me start from the beginning. We have our thrusters connected to the pixhawk on port 1 to 6 (thruster 1 on port 1 and so on) After calibrating the motion and gyro we have calibrated our joystick (X-box one controller) by following the images during setup. We do the same for the RC calibration but the results in the RCMAP parameters are not the same as described on the ardusub website (configuration). The following settings area applied:
RCMAP_FORWARD 3
RCMAP_LATERAL 4
RCMAP_PITCH 6
RCMAP_ROLL 7
RCMAP_THROTTLE 3
RC_MAP_YAW 4
looking at the MAVlink inspector channel 3 and 5 give a value of 1100 when I don’t touch the joystick.
When I try to arm the unit I get the message Throttle to high. Changing the parameters of RC channel a bit sometimes lets me arm the unit but the auto and manual control is not as it should be.
