I cannot believe my eyes tonight. I am working on some circuit boards for Yuneec camera gimbals. I have three of the old gimbals from the original Q500 drones. These are the GoPro gimbals. I have one that I crashed and wanted to repair it. I open up the gimbal and what do I find? The exact same part number for the CGO3 gimbal. So I compare the board and it is exactly the same in every way. Crazy that Yuneec went back to this board and used it with the CGO3
CGO3 Main circuit board
- Thread starter cabinfourus
- Start date
It would be interesting to know if the board from the GoPRo gimbal is individually mated to it's gimbal. On the CGo3, the gimbal board will only work with the gimbal it came on, unless you ship it to a service center to rematch it to the new gimbal.
You are correct, the gimbal boards on the GoPro and CGO3 are the exact same. The only difference is the software that is installed. If I ever got into a bind when repairing a CGO3 gimbal board, I could simply replace it with one from a GoPro gimbal. All that was needed was to erase all the calibration data and re calibrate as a CGO3. Worked like a charm.
I want that software. I am working with the developers software and some other stuff to compare the firmware on them,.
Do you have the software? I would like to find the code they are using on these boards.
Here is what I have found so far.
The GoPro gimbal and the cgo3 gimbal boards are the exact same. The firmware is the difference. As far as married to the gimbal, Yuneec uses different boards to read yaw, pitch, and roll. They are magnetic readers that read position from the motor's shaft. I have not had time to test my theory yet but I feel the only reason you can't swap just the 'gimbal board' is because they have the magnetic boards. Does anyone know if the boards themselves are married? I do know if you change the mainboard you must keep it with the IMU it came with as these two are calibrated together. I am not sure if the yaw, pitch, and roll boards are in this calibration marriage.
What I do find funny is that Yuneec went away from the GoPro design and then back to it. The cgo2 is completely different. When I compared the firmware files I found big differences. I have not tried to flash the GoPro gimbal with CGO3 firmware yet, but it's in my future plans. I am currently modifying the GoPro's metal gimbal parts to work with a CGO3 camera.
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The critical match (on a CGo3) is between the IMU and the Gimbal board.
The three position sensors can USUALLY be swapped between gimbals, but I have run into a few exceptions I can't explain. Most common exception I have noted is with the Yaw sensor. The tilt (pitch) and roll sensors can almost always be swapped between gimbals and even between positions if you adjust the wire length. The pitch/roll sensors have different wire lengths, otherwise they are the same.
That is what I was thinking. The IMU and Gimbal board are 'married' together. As long as you keep the two together I don't see a problem using the GB (gopro) boards in a cgo3 setup. One would have to flash the cgo3 firmware to it.
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