As I've been reading through your thread, one thing keeps concerning me. I have lots of experience with Arduino in many of it's form factors. (One of my favorite things to do is Mentoring a FIRST Robotics team, and we use Arduinos for both prototyping and even on our competition robots for various functions.) What has concerned me is the Mega and connecting signals in and out of it. From experience, I can tell you that Murphy has a lot to say about the reliability of the connections. They are guaranteed to fail at the worst possible moment! Add to that, they will be intermittent failures that can not be reproduced during troubleshooting.
My suggestion? Solder to it whenever possible.
With you finally past the point of trying to keep it minimal budget, I feel comfortable in hinting that it may be time for a sensor integrated FC. (Just my $.02)
The only connection issue I've had was actually my PPM wire at one point - and that was due to too many crashes causig the wire to break internally just past it's connector. And honestly even with fully integrated FC's 99% of people are still running connectors - just with the sex reversed (Pins on the board instead of sockets on the board.) Once I cleaned up my wiring with 90 degree pins so they are more protected in crashes I haven't had any issues with connections.
The PPM issues are perplexing...but don't seem at all to be connection related. I'm pretty sure my LRS is damaged from too many crashes since it rides on top and takes the brunt of many impacts.
And my use of the mega is anything but low budget at this point having replaced it three times - it's mainly because I have other things I want to experiment with that just wont' be possible with a traditional controller. The flexibility and options availble with this setup are the reason I've stuck with it. If I was wanting this just for flying and not as an experimental platform I'd probably have swapped to a Flip board a few months ago since I could fit it internally well protected and super clean.
But I still want to play with driving my RGB LED's from the arduino, some GPS related stuff, and a few other ideas floating in the back of my head I'm not quite ready to share yet
I am using the FrSky DJT module in my Turnigy 9x, flashed with ER9x, along with various FrSky RX's. I couldn't be happier! I don't want to sidetrack this thread with opinions on FrSky vs Futaba vs. Spektrum etc. etc. Let's just say, I made an informed decision when I chose FrSky.
Budget is the main reason I've stuck with the stock FlySky stuff on my 9x. I do have an Orange DSM module because I want to be able to fly BNF's the next time my wife mistakenly buys me one as a gift instead of having to return it
(And it's letting my fly my friends Warp while he's out of town since the Spektrum Sat works so well on that setup.)
FrSky is by far what I would choose if I was to invest in a more robust 2.4ghz system. But my interests mostly lie in park flyer foamies and longer range stuff that 2.4 just won't handle - hence my jump to openLRS.
At some point I do plan on picking up some FrSky gear...but the budget and need just haven't been there.
Thanks!!
It's been fun figuring out all the nuances, but I'm almost there. I just need to figure out how to get the GUI to work the way it's supposed to. For some reason, quite possibly me, it won't work in "Live" mode with any of my servos. I fly a Tri, so you can see how that might be a problem.
So, until I get it working normally, I must resort to hacking the code. (So far I know of two ways to make MW do what I want. But, only one works and the official way doesn't.....yet.)
I wish I had something to suggest on your issue but all I can think of is trying an eeprom wipe which I'm guessing you probably already have. Not sure why but I've seen the eeprom get corrupted in odd ways quite a few times with MW when experimenting and that's the kind of symptom I see when it happens. I did have a similar problem with my minimOSD where changes in the GUI weren't saving - but that turned out be due to using my FTDI adapter at 3.3v instead of 5v. It would connect and all seemed to work well at 3.3v but nothing would actually write to the eeprom. I'm guessing that's not your issue though so I haven't mentioned it.
When I do get a cam and get stabilization setup my big concern is I don't want to give up any of my aux channels but I do want to be able to adjust my camera angle manually. I have a few possible solutions but since I don't have a cam yet...I once again haven't looked very far into them yet
Almost pulled the trigger on the mobius last night...but we've got a vet appointment for the dog tomorrow and I know it's going to cost more than I expect (because it always does anymore) so figured I better play it safe...maybe next week it's looking like I can make that happen finally...we'll see.