Sunday, January 4, 2015

Iris Telemetry (RX)

Today I completed my original IRIS telemetry setup on the receiver side (TX is here).  This completes the telemetry setup and it is at least mostly working.  I tried to buy the right parts to get plug in the RX but I failed to get the right connector for the receiver.  I'm Annoyed that 3DR didn't ship the telemetry cable with the FrSky RX given that FrSky seems to ship it by default.  Anyhow...
Parts List:
 FUL-1 (level shifter and inverter I believe)
 Any 6pin df16 cable
 Any 4pin df16 cable
 Some 4 pin .1" pitch cable
 Pre-assembled 4pin molex picoblade cable (I haven't found this yet)

This is the setup I was working from and really contains everything you need except finding some of the parts and that the serial port speed on the Pixhawk->FrSky telemetry port seems to be 9600 baud which needs to be configured in APM Planner, its just above the setting for telemetry port 2's output protocol mentioned in the above link.  I just cut the ends of the cables off above and soldered them up to make the cables from the page above.
  As mentioned I never found the FrSky RX plug which sucked (3DR clearly ships this cable and converter with the Iris+, wish they just put it on their website).  I gave up and just soldered to the pins on the back of the RX, I'll fix this when I find the connector.

An important note that I screwed up the color scheme here compared to what everyone else seems to to.  Yellow and Brown are usually reversed of what I did.  The connection is not great.  In the end it really needs the correct plug.  The cable is bent sharply when installed in place which pulled off the first solder job (I was being paranoid about heat).  I don't recommend this.
Here's the final setup.  The important part is the FUL-1 connected between Pixhawk Telemetry 2 and the FrSky RX.  
  Telemetry doesn't seen perfect.  I'm not sure how much of this is due to the transmitter firmware (I'm currently on er9x-frsky, I've been meeting to try opentx), maybe some of my installation, possibly the pixhawk not implementing exactly the FrSky hub protocol or possibly even radio interference.
  * Some values occasionally are corrupt, including random characters in numeric fields
  * Trying to reconfigure the customer telemetry fields while the radio is receiving telemetry data doesn't work
  * The backlight sometimes flickers when telemetry is active
  I'll report back when I have time to fly it.

2 comments:

  1. It seems that you are in a bit of a pickle there... Too bad, since the 3DR Iris+ is an excelent drone. For those who want to find out more about this model, I suggest checking out this review: http://mydronelab.com/reviews/3dr-iris-plus.html

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