Status of Gimbal Support

QGroundControl Development
1

Hi Devs,

I’d like to get an understanding of what the status (both current and planned) of support for control/monitoring of gimbals/mounts in QGC is; mostly MAVLink gimbals, but others if there is cross-over. For example, stuff like:

  1. UI indication of whether a connected aircraft has a gimbal, and if so, which way it’s facing (via the various MOUNT related messages).

  2. Control of such gimbals other than over RC channels.

Is there any existing functionality, or work intended along these lines?

Thanks!

2

Good question. So support in QGC is actually pretty good meaning that you can add gimbal commands to mission items (waypoints), however, the tricky thing is that these commands are actually communicated to whatever thing you have connected to a Pixhawk (or similar).

I suggest you have a look at the vmount driver:
https://github.com/PX4/Firmware/tree/master/src/drivers/vmount
and it’s parameters MNT_*:
https://docs.px4.io/en/advanced_config/parameter_reference.html#mount

And check these PX4 docs:
https://dev.px4.io/en/advanced/gimbal_control.html

Now to your actual questions:

  1. There is the message MOUNT_ORIENTATION but I’m not sure if this is displayed yet.
  2. As part of a mission yes as mentioned above.
3

Hi Julian,

Thanks for your reply. I’m specifically interested in the functionality within QGC (not PX4, since we run Ardupilot): for comparison, Mission Planner supports both indication of gimbal orientation (as you say, via MOUNT_ORIENTATION) and also control of the gimbal (for instance, you can directly command the gimbal to move to its stow position via a button).

Cheers.