Has anyone had any success binding the ST16 ground station to other radio control devices? i.e. if I were to build an RC-type car with camera mounted on it, could I utilize this controller? I don't even know where to start! I see a number of people have asked about pairing the ST16 with other drones, but I didn't see anything with regard to devices that stay on the ground. Am I just searching the threads incorrectly? TIA
I believe it can be done, but will require some amount of programming and additional electronics, over and above normal RC-type car stuff. It isn't easy but I believe it is doable.
This thread has some information about decoding the serial protocol of the yuneec receiver.
Just trying to understand some of this post ( way out of my league) what I am trying to find out if I could put a Yuneec flight controller in a 550s frame and run it with the ST16 ???? I think there is a little more to it than that. I'm pretty sure that in addition to the the yuneec flight...
yuneecpilots.com
Eventually I was able to program a microcontroller to take the output of the yuneec receiver (often found on ebay for <$10) and output a PPM signal that can be interpreted by a lot of different flight controller boards. This code could be modified to output discreet pwm signals to drive an RC car. Someone else in that thread also had some info about sniffing the zigbee signal which might make it possible to use an off the shelf zigbee module as a receiver, rather than a surplus Yuneec receiver.
I also had what appeared to be some success converting the Yuneec serial output to SBUS but I never really tested it much and never posted it. That probably wouldn't help you for a ground RC car unless it was also incorporating a flight controller board for some reason..
Controlling the camera is another challenge. The CGO3+ camera has its own serial interface that has to send out a specific initialization sequence at power up. After that it requires "Mavlink like" messages to be sent with the pan, tilt, and yaw commands. There are still a lot of messages that are sent back and forth to the camera that I don't understand, but to just move the camera this thread has some test code that seemed to work (again using an additional microcontroller):
@dylanfm: I'm intrested in that MAVlink-like message format that you found. Up to now I saw two different format in the sensor files, one from Typhoon H has packet start ID &BC and the messages from Typhoon H Plus start with $FD. The last one van be decodes according this: mavlink/c_library_v2...
yuneecpilots.com
That camera output code would need to be merged in with the receiver decode code in the other thread.
I think all the information is there, and eventually I want to get around to doing something like this myself in addition to other uses for the ST16, but who knows when.
Dylan