Gimbal control (PWM) via Mount settings

Hello!

I’m having difficulty getting the ‘Mount’ settings correct to use a Mavlink command from my joystick to control the pitch of my camera gimbal via PWM and could use some help :slightly_smiling_face:

My setup: Running PX4 (latest firmware) on a VOXL Flight over a microhard connection from QGC. The UAV is controlled via an Xbox controller set up as a joystick. Everything works great except for being able to get a MAVLINK command for ‘gimbal up’ or ‘gimbal down’ to then be output via PWM on Aux1. It’s easy to set up with a standard RC transmitter and a pass through channel, but much harder when running joystick through QGC.

As I understand it, any combination of Mount inputs and outputs can be used together, so I set ‘MNT_MODE_IN’ to ‘MAVLINK_DO_MOUNT’ and ‘MNT_MODE_OUT’ to ‘AUX’. I then look at the inspector to check the outputs in real time and the ‘mount orientation’ tab shows the button inputs via the joystick are translating into a pitch value, but the servo output PWM doesn’t change.

I’m hoping I’m just missing something obvious here. As I understand the Mount settings, the default mixer is set to pass the pitch control via Aux1 with this setup, but it’s not doing that for me.

I’d appreciate any help or advice anyone has as I’ve spent a couple hours troubleshooting with no success.

1 Like

im with you brother.
using actuator mode is something to try. sys_ctrl_alloc to enable

Hi,
I have tried it but it does not work

I realize this is an old post, we eventually switched to an RC pass-through to solve the issue and bypass the camera pitch control.

The only other thing I wanted to add here in case anyone in the future runs into similar problems is to make sure ‘COM_PREARM_CHECK’ is set to ALWAYS, otherwise auxiliary outputs won’t initialize until the system is armed, which can lead to frustration when trying to bench test!