Project Goals

Controlling the Ronin SC Gimbal with:

• Directly from a Raspberry Pi (in progress)
• Arduino (done)
• Roboquest ROS System on a Raspberry Pi (done)

Circuit

• A Serial inverter is used to invert the serial signal from the Arduino TX into an SBUS signal the Gimbal understands
• A Raspberry pi connects to the Arduino board from UART3 TX to pin 3 on the Arduino so that they can communicate through Software Serial
• When communicating with Serial between 2 devices, the 2 devices GND must be connected too
• Note that the circuit shows a Pihat designed by the Roboquest organization. This can also be a signal that comes from the Pi gpio uart pin.

Arduino Quick Start

1. Download BMC_SBUS Library

• Clone: https://github.com/boldstelvis/BMC_SBUS
• Extract folder "BMC_SBUS" (not the whole repo) into your Arduino/libraries folder

2. Upload arduino_controller.ino (in arduino_controller) to an Arduino
3. Run keyboard.py on a pi

NOTE: Install the SoftwareSerial library in Arduino IDE if necessary

ROS Quick Start

1. Flash a Raspberry Pi with the RoboQuest OS (only available to VCHS)
2. Do all steps from Arduino Quick Start
3. Add the following line to /boot/config.txt and then reboot the Pi: dtoverlay=uart3
4. Copy and paste gimbal.py into your main package
5. Go to the Robot Dashboard Site
6. Create a Joystick that publishes to the topic /transform

NOTE: you will need a Roboquest PiHat