Hi all,
First time poster here! My friend has recently built a quadcopter and we are toying with an idea of making an Arduino-based quadcopter with an automatic hover function. My question is: how do I control one (or possibly several) Q Brain 4 x 25A speed controller? He's put me in charge of programming (pretty much the only thing I can do considering the options haha), so I might need to know soon.
Thanks
pretty much the only thing I can do
Then you don't need help?
Post a link to the hardware that you want to communicate with.
Here it is:
Well, I do need help, but my partner is more skilled in the mechanical and electric components.
I'm not familiar enough with the Uno/Mega timers that are normally used for servos/ESCs, but I am familiar with the Adafruit 16 channel servo controller. It seems to work ok for ESC control without using up any resources on the Arduino except the two connections for the I2C bus.
It gives 8 bit resolution normally, but you may be able to increase that to 10 bit resolution by changing the update time. Will that be good enough for your partner?
What is meant by "resolution"? This is to do with the PWM, right?
Also, we have both decided that this project is too ambitious for the moment, but we're still interested in finding out what we'd have to do/know to make it possible.
It has to do with how accurate you want the motor speed to be. 8 bit resolution will give you 256 speed selections. 10 bit will give you 1024 selections.
edit: Just because your PWM pulse will be accurate to the specified resolution doesn't mean the ESC will have that resolution capability.
I don't suppose it would require such high precision; 256 should be more than enough.
I use 8 bit resolution on my fixed wing setup, and it seems to be fairly accurate, at least enough for my application. The joystick potentiometers I use don't give me any better resolution than that.