After much searching and reading of threads here and on other forums I am reluctantly adding another ESC telemetry thread to the mix, I promise it is unique. So I have a unusual helicopter design that has a drive motor system with a single throttle input which in reality is two motors driven by two separate ESC’s - they happen to be APD 200 F3[x] units and I have a microcontroller which takes in a PWM input from the CubePilot and controls the APD ESC’s with DSHOT 600 commands - the microcontroller also collects up the TLM data (KISS format) as well as measuring the motor speed with independent hall effect sensors - I bundle up the TLM from the two ESC’s and create a SINGLE ESC TM stream (totalized current for both, totalized consumption for both, hottest ESC, lowest measured voltage and average eRPM) which I had hoped I could ingest into the Cube via one of the spare serial ports - I have tried GPS2 and TELEM 2 , setting the protocol to the value of 16 does not seem to work at all. I am starting to wonder if the option 16 is even the KISS protocol or something else. So anyway given all the trouble folks appear to have with this I am wondering if there is another format I can use that DOES work - or perhaps can I send the data over Mavlink2, does that work or would the data collide with the empty ESC TM data I see in the status messages ?
The serial port set to “16” will be expecting DSHOT telemetry.
Is it possible you can just send DSHOT direct to the ESCs (the APD ESCs do take DSHOT) and you just join their telem wire together and feed to the serial port?
The data will show in Ardupilot logged under ESC0 and ESC1 and so on.
I tried that first - I could not get DSHOT on the CubePilot to work with the APD, which is crazy, it took me like 15 minutes to write some code on a Teensy 4.0 to do DSHOT perfectly. I do have a DSHOT capable load in my CubePilot - from what I can tell it has been hit or miss with people getting DSHOT working on the CubePilot Orange.
Did you have the ESC signal wires connected to the AUX outputs and all the params correct?
Something like this:
SERVO_BLH_AUTO,1
MOT_PWM_MAX,2000
MOT_PWM_MIN,1000
MOT_PWM_TYPE,4
SERIAL2_BAUD,115200
SERIAL2_OPTIONS,16
SERIAL2_PROTOCOL,16
SERVO9_FUNCTION,33
SERVO9_MAX,2000
SERVO9_MIN,1000
SERVO9_TRIM,1000
SERVO10_FUNCTION,34
SERVO10_MAX,2000
SERVO10_MIN,1000
SERVO10_TRIM,1000
SERVO11_FUNCTION,35
SERVO11_MAX,2000
SERVO11_MIN,1000
SERVO11_TRIM,1000
SERVO12_FUNCTION,36
SERVO12_MAX,2000
SERVO12_MIN,1000
SERVO12_TRIM,1000
I’ve used this before and it’s always worked. Settings shown here a for a quadcopter, but the theory is the same.
There’s even a bidirectional DSSOT firmware build now so the telem data comes back via the ESC signal wires instead of a separate telem wire and serial port. That only includes RPM though.
I can try it again - unfortunately I cannot do bi-directional DSHOT with the APD 200 F, it has an optocoupler front end and is “receive” only. - I would love it if it would work !
so I set it up again, it is a traditional helicopter so the servo function is 31 (HeliRSC), I do not have any parameters with the prefix MOT_PWM_. I also set the following
SERVO_BLH_OTYPE, 6
SERVO_DSHOT_ESC, 1
SERVO_DSHOT_RATE,1
SERVO_BLH_AUTO,1
SERIAL2_BAUD,115200
SERIAL2_OPTIONS,16
SERIAL2_PROTOCOL,16
SERVO9_FUNCTION,31
SERVO9_MAX,2000
SERVO9_MIN,1000
SERVO9_TRIM,1000
no DSHOT signals are received by the ESC, I put an oscilloscope on the Aux line and it was a PWM signal once armed - Maybe this just doesn’t work for a traditional helicopter.