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Making a wireless remote controller for a Gimbal - Absolute beginner here!
  • liszon
    Hello guys,

    Recently I bought a 3 axis gimbal stabilizer called Argo from Came-TV:

    http://bit.ly/2lU88Vk

    This beauty uses a 32 bit Alexmos Board so I can make adjustments via the SimpleBGC GUI.
    Came sells this with a very simple Bluetooth remote controller:

    http://bit.ly/2lUqwh5

    My problem is that this tiny thing has only one joystick for controlling both pan and tilt, even if I fine tune my RC settings in the software making mistakes is almost inevitable. The best thing would be to get a controller that has two sticks which could be mapped for yaw and pitch separately. This way I could pull off some really sophisticated moves and use the gimbal as a remote pan and tilt head on a camera slider.

    I am already doing this even with the bundled thumb controller, have a look:

    http://bit.ly/2lUjCbr

    I like the results but the job could be a hundred times easier with a decent controller.

    Now do you think there is a Bluetooth device somewhere that could be compatible with the Argo and I could make it work with SimpleBGC ?

    Or - and here comes the complicated part:

    I see the Argo has an external PWM control input, this is how it looks like, under the rubber lid I have 9 small pins:

    http://bit.ly/2lYQmAK

    I have a feeling I could connect some sort of a PWM receiver/transmitter radio here and map it in SimpleBGC.
    I don't have any ideas where to begin with it, I am really not the RC helicopter guy, I have no idea what to buy, even no clue what terminology should I use when I ask a question about it, haha!

    But what I am thinking about is to follow someones awesome guidance and get something similar to this - http://bit.ly/2lYZsxe - or any close sibling with the right radio protocols and hook it up to the gimbal.

    All I need really is the ability to assign pan to one joystick and tilt to the other one. And extra options like a mode switch would be icing on the cake.
    I would need to know what radio transmitter/receiver package to buy, what wires to get and how to connect them without frying everything. A bit of help regarding the RC tab and doing mapping in SimpleBGC would be super-duper too.

    About that picture with the Argo's PWM input I can only guess Y-IN means Yaw and P-IN might mean Pitch, then I have Signal, 5V power and Ground. Everything else is a mystery.

    It would make me entirely grateful if there's anybody here who could help me make this work and give me some advice.

    Best regards,
    Artur
  • Garug
    I Suggest to go with DSM or SBUS receiver. First make sure though your system supports that. If it is a 32 bit board it should have necessary connections, but you might need to activate the +5V to power the receiver. and some boards had problems with DSM, so it requires some digging in. Hopefully Came-TV can provide support on that.

    Then I would suggest connecting RC speed to left up/down control and Yaw, pitch, (roll) as you like. Having RC speed control makes the control much better. Also set RC expo to your liking on GUI. I usually use it around 70. RC_LPF and ACC limit are also useful to experiment. If your controller has sliders/knobs, you can control these also real time via GUI adjustable variables (depending of controller and FW you have)
  • liszon
    Hey Garug, thanks for getting back.

    What is the advantage of going SBUS over PWM?
    The gimbal is still under warranty, I wouldn't open it up to check what pins I might have under the hood. I would like to use the connections made available by Came if there is a chance. The question is, what should I connect into that PWM input I made a picture of to make it compatible with a wireless RC transmitter with joysticks?
  • Garug
    Sbus is more accurate and requires connecting only one wire. PWM will require a separate wire for each controlled item and often the available PWM inputs run out.
  • liszon
    Gotcha, thanks man.
    In the meantime someone gave me a detailed breakdown on what Rx/Tx combo I need to make this work, will see how it goes.
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