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Raspberry Pi communication with MultiWii

Posted: Wed Jan 11, 2017 11:47 pm
by ben_xman
*hopefully this is in a reasonable topic area*

A bit of background: My current project consists of a Raspberry Pi A+ running Raspbian and an Arduino Duemilanove running MultiWii as the brains behind my quadcopter. Both are sitting right next to each other and hooked into a rechargeable battery.

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The reason behind using this setup is splitting the loads. Raspberry Pi is good for Wifi connections, camera, and other software-heavy applications. The Arduino should be obvious as it's the hardware running MultiWii and it's better for running ESC's and servos.

So, with this in mind, I'm trying to figure out a way to allow the Pi and the Arduino to talk. The Raspberry picks up controller signals (either through the GPIO pins somehow or through a Wifi connection) and relays them to the Arduino using a Python script.

I think I understand from reading through the code included in MultiWii, pins D2, D4, D5, and D6 are inputs for the Yaw, Pitch, Roll, and Throttle on the Arduino. If that's the case then I think setting GPIO pins on the Pi to send related signals to the pins on the Arduino should work.
The only problem is WHAT signals to send and HOW to send them.

If this prior idea doesn't work out right, maybe sending over RX and TX signals through serial communications instead? This might be a bit complex for me but if that's the only way, then I suppose it's needed.

Anyhow, I appreciate any help in this because I REALLY want this to work out.