Drone Project – 7-30-24

Working on the drone 2 days in a row, now we’re cooking!

Main Goal:

Fly it and attach a camera

Execution:

I have another small racing drone that has an FPV camera on so I took a look at it, removed it and was going to fit it to big boy drone here. I took it off and read the pins that it was attached to on the racing drone which was GND, 9V, RX & TX.

Looking at Pixhawk 6X there isn’t a pinout that says “Camera” or anything easy of course. Time to look at the manuals! The Pixhawk 6X had some notes for telemetry but I’m a novice and wasn’t sure what it was looking for. Taking a quick gander at the camera which I had no idea what it was so I Google the label, CADDXFPV, and find that it could be a Walksnail Avator? Link Here. So again, we have the four wire leads RX,TX,GND, VCC but it says UART, what does this stand for? FC and this rings a bell with the UART labeled on Pixhawk 6X which is some weird connection type.

I start to make my own wire and then I see it has a wire already…. heck this wire was already made to plug into what I need…. Oh hey! I already did this once before. Triple check pin-outs and yup, it should work. Off to the yard!

Takeoff:

Plug it all in and everything is working as is. Camera loads up (upside down so I gotta flip that around).

Flight was great. At first, it seemed with a slow responsiveness and then I realized that I was in a different flight mode. Stabilize, loiter, and Auto? Not sure, I’ll look into it more and understand what it’s supposed to do.

Other Findings

My batteries suck. I have 2 older 11.1V 3S batteries and they both drained very quick even though they were allegedly fully charged before. I have 1 newer 11.1V 3S Battery but that was working for the FPV headset. I do have another 4S 14.8V Battery but the charger is claiming that it is low voltage so now I hope that it’s not ruined… Gotta look into that too.

I did get the Googles to read battery voltage. Is this the data that the RX,TX is pulling from the camera on a UART Channel? Find out.

Next Steps

  • Find some more batteries.
  • Find the recommended camera for long range with telemetry
  • Understand Flight Modes more
  • Get I get the range strength of radio transmission? of Video signal?
  • Can I get telemetry on altitude, flight speed, orientation, wind speed, what else?
  • Generally should make wiring better and airframe structure better, later problem but fun to look into