Camera gimbal tilt with APM

Installed a Beholder-Lite Gimbal on my Hex this weekend.   The Beholder is a simple AlexMoss based gimbal that’s self sustaining.  All you need to is give it +5v (or in my case hook it up to power distribution and you’re set).

Once I had it mounted I thought, wow I’d like to be able to control the tilt so I ventured off to search the internets, but my google-fu failed me.   Mission planner and what I read said that APM was set up to control servo-based gimbals.  This is a brushless gimbal, and I don’t want APM to control it.   Only allow me to control the tilt of it so that when I’m filming I can tilt the camera down.

So after a little experimentation here is what I’ve got.

The Gimbal came with a cable and the weak documentation simply showed this:

So I poked around some more and found where I could plug those into the APM and in fact did so on the top. In A10 and A11, now I really don’t care about Roll, but I plugged it in anyway.

In Mission Planner, I played with the following:

I set the Output to RC11
The Input to Channel 6, which was already properly configured and assigned to the tuning knob on my Spectrum DX8

I played with the servo limit values so that when the knob is all the way turned back I’m simply pointing forward, and when it’s all the way forward, the camera points straight down.

For this to work, Channel 6 must not be assigned in the normal Copter Pids section:

All of that give me this:

Enjoy…