Are There Any Other Drones that work with the Yuneec, I want to Build a custom drone from scratch and use a Yuneec st16 but haven't got the slightest clue on how to bind them, I haven't started the project yet, but I will post progress pics here if i do manage to get them binded together, I love the look of the ST16 with the screen, but that's a expensive $150 paperweight if i can't bind it. To be clear i don't have a Yuneec Drone or controller, I started the project yesterday and am looking at parts. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
-Jensen.
The receiver and communication protocol used by Yuneec are not useable on other drones as-is. There is information on this forum about using a microcontroller to convert the communication protocol of the Yuneec receiver into other formats that could be used in a custom drone (such as PPM or SBUS). This does require obtaining a Yuneec receiver which isn't super cheap. Someone who is better at programming than I could probably fork the code for one of the popular flight controller firmware (such as cleanflight) and add in the Yuneec serial protocol so that an extra converter microcontroller wouldn't be necessary. I have looked into it briefly but I think it is beyond my capabilities.
But that just allows you to control a custom drone, not receive video.
The real "problem" using the ST16 for a custom drone is that there aren't very many camera that will transmit video back from the drone and display it on the ST16. Those cameras are not super adaptable to custom drones and are pretty expensive. There has been talk in this thread and another one on this forum about using a raspberry pi to emulate a CGO3 camera and therefore make a cheap camera system that is viewable on the ST16, but I personally haven't had a lot of success with getting something usable yet. To me, without being able to view the live video on the ST16 it isn't really worth using on a custom drone. It is bigger than needed (if not getting video) and isn't that great of quality.
The Yuneec ST10 controller communicate with the same receiver as the ST16, so the converter micro controller method can work with that transmitter also. The ST10 can display video from MK58 video transmitter. The MK58 is meant to transmit video from a gopro but really can transmit any analog video signal. I'm not sure how easy it is to get an MK58 video transmitter any more but I think that make the ST10 much more useful for custom drone hacking.
In general, I have spent a lot of time hacking around trying to use the ST16 and ST10 for other purposes but is mostly because I have them already and/or found cheap parts. They are older technology and a pretty closed system. I personally wouldn't invest much money in them if I was starting from scratch.
Dylan
