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

Download BMC_SBUS Library

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

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

NOTE: Install the SoftwareSerial library in Arduino IDE if necessary

ROS Quick Start

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

NOTE: you will need a Roboquest PiHat