Gyro / Arudino question

Evening All,

Been playing with Arudino for a couple of weeks now and love it. I thinking of replacing the gyro in my tyhoon with one but wondering if this would work.

when on the surface

I will have control of both the front plane and rear link together so both go in the same direction. ie / /

but when under

I put it in auto mode and then the rear plane are just controlled by the gyro.

reason for do this is I hoping it will help dive level. is this worth doing.

cheers

I haven't tried level control for some time. Then it was using accelerometers with voltage output feeding into the analogue to digital input of PIC processors. It wasn't very good with not enough sensitivity.

I would try getting a digital accelerometer to talk to an Arduino, if I was you. (By the way it is accelerometers you want. Things that measure gravity (tilt) rather than gyros which (I think!) measure angular acceleration.)

You might try building on what Tim Senecal has already done using the LSM303 D chip. This is used for telemetry with an Arduino really as a electronic compass. But the chip also has accelerometers for 3 dimensions and all for about £9 !

You would be able to get the software up and running for the compass and maybe then get a single accelerometer output to then run pwm to a servo.

I don't know how you are getting on with the Arduino. I find the Nano clones are good. The Serial Monitor is also so useful in getting things running.

David

Hi David,

Thanks, i will give it a go. think in the kit i got there was a 3 and 2 angle accelerometers. I starting to under stand it and can get it to do what i want with one chanel but not two.

I got it to read 4 channel on the serial port and display the reading.

Not sure if you have already found this but looking ahead to possibly using one of the many 3-axis accelerometer boards I found a good paper from the semi manufacturer NXP on how to convert the 3-axis outputs to pitch/roll/yaw.
Its lots of maths but a lot would simplify based on the fact pitch/roll should be small (unlike aerospace examples), though not sure it would be feasible on an arduino nano. RP2040 versions or raspberry pi pico should have the grunt and code space to do it.
It also is good at explaing why things can go loopy under certain conditions.

Rather than include it here, the app note is AN3461 from NXP/Freescale titled 'Tilt Sensing Using a Three-Axis Accelerometer', simply look for NXP AN3461 and it should appear in your favourite browser.

You still have the task of generating the control surface movement from the pitch angle, but its a start if you like to roll your own stuff.

I personally use "off the shelf" boards for quadrocopters and INAV in Airplane mode.

it has a learning curve but you get a finished control loop and only have to set your PID gains.

And you need the Channels from the receiver as as von PPM stream, but there adapaters for this.

https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav