[wish] VAR telemetry sensors

azaz44 commented 1 year ago

As this is a long post, here's TL;DR version of the request:

Then background follows.

Let me say first, that "Calculated telemetry sensors" are a super great feature of Ethos. This is something I was always missing in OpenTX, that is - some way to make calculations. This opens a door for many things, but especially allow to make more logic, like:

test if A > (B - 400)
test if A < B * 110%
etc.

But it allows for much more. Aligning voltages, compensating from ESC sending too much mAh consumed etc. is so easy now. This function was there in OpenTX but very limited. In Ethos it really shines.

My case: I setup an alarm if mAh_Consumed > mAh_Usable - 400 so I know when to land. mAh_Usable is capacity available in the battery. It is selected by user. This is how I get it. Var mixer:

So as you see, I select the battery with FS 1-6. Percentage number means "% of 10000mAh". So "38%" means 3800 mAh. In addition I have alarms, so radio will tell me if I forgot to select battery.

Then in telemetry counters I add "Calculated sensor", to know battery capacity. This converts % to real mAh.

(there are some calculation issues ATM, like mentioned here: https://github.com/FrSkyRC/ETHOS-Feedback-Community/issues/2617 and sometimes it's not clear if sth should be multiplied by 10 or 100 or 1000, but in general it's possible to get anything I want).

Then it's easy - next sensor to tell what mAh is still left to use:

And based on this, it's easy to setup a couple of alarms to tell you when to land and how much is left. All of this, having different batteries, with different age or capacities.

Now to the "wish" part. Defining these capacities as "percentage of 10000" in a var mixer works. But in reality it would be better to do sth like this:

This would be useful in many cases, like selecting pack capacity, defining any levels of voltage, time, whatever, based on physical or logical switches. I could even define what voltage is expected from battery in case I mix different voltage packs (possible in some of my models, where they could run on both 12s and 14s system without any hardware changes).

This could be either added in "telemetry" counters, as a new type or just new type of "Var" formula here:

Or it could maybe become part of new variables in 1.5.0: