What I read into the description of what you want to do suggests you may not be aware that the gimbal and the camera are two different control systems. The video related camera stuff, including the settings, camera select. camera mode, snapshot, video, etc. are all on 5.8 WIFI.
It is the gimbal part that has the PWM issue. It will stabilize without any external signal. But the manual tilt control comes through the 2.4 drone control WiFi and includes an initialization code. I believe some folks managed to deduce the code and even emulate it with some extra equipment, but I am not sure if that was for the CGo3 or a different Yuneec camera of the same era.
@h-elsner may know how to find the website that included the discussion.
...well that was informative...!
Yes, indeed I looked at camera and gimbal as one single unit, not two individuals.
That makes it easy to swap the camera for something from open-source and current technology. What I would call a "off the shelf" solution instead of hacking to tap the video-signal before it goes into the wifi-part of the unit.
I will definitely look into that gimbal control some more!
While I have that function, I would definitely like to use it...
It should be easy to feed data to the gimbal with an tiny arduino, which in turn gets fed by the flightcontrol. Instead of just passing the servo-PWM through, the arduino would sit idle to allow for the boot-sequence, then once initialises the gimbal for tilt-control and from then on send the servo-PWM.
Definitely doable and a small exercise - once you did the reverse-engineering to know what to send to the gimbal...
Do you have knowledge about the ESC-controls? Are these standard-servo PWM-signals? Or is there a databus, communicating between ESC and mainboard?
It's a shame Yuneec did not drop any data or specifications on the system and interfaces. The product could live quite long if the firmware was open-sourced and components could be exchanged by new and modern adapted components...
PS: I just replaced the IMU of the specimen in question. Got a new SMD-chip for about 8 bucks from mouser. Bought two to be on the safe side, had to pay 20 bucks for shipping...
Diagnostics show everything as ok, test flight will have to wait some days for the weather to improve...