So I set this up primarily so that new folk (and my son) don't use obscene amounts of gas when trying out a ship for the first time. The short of it is that with modern OPENTX based transmitters, you can program in a timer that prevents a solenoid from being on for longer than a specified amount of time. This will work on any of the taranis transmitters, most of the upgraded mainboards for the 9X family, and likely most other openTX transmitters. It will NOT work on stock 9x's. One could use the same type of method to implement a shot timer. I have mine setup on sticks, but it works equally well with buttons in place of the sticks. this setup works well for stick bangers. it could be made more robust as denoted below for an ON duration setup, set the switch to have either a a>x or a<x function, depending on the direction of stick motion for activating a particular channel set V1 to the input (Ail in my case, can also be any channel output, real or virtual), and the V2 threshold to a value high enough to avoid accidental firing but BELOW the value that actuates the solenoid valve Set duration to the number of seconds to hold on. limited to 0.1 second increments, but finer resolution is available with some tweaks as shown later (screenshot from the opentx companion) Now you just have to set up the mix, I will show three options I have used This setting uses the switch to override the input. as long as the switch is active, the stick input is sent out, when it is inactive, the output is neutral on the Chanel. Curve CV04 simply makes the stick more sensitive, so that full output is achieved at 50% of the stick motion. this option uses the logical switch value directly as the output. it is better than the first option but I have used the first option more, so I show them all. Note the need to set a proper offset. This option is similar to the previous except SLOW is utilized. To get finer resolution than 0.1 seconds of ON time, you can set the switch duration shorter than required and then change the output from a square wave to having a slope when turning off. this will let you tweak the duration in much finer than 0.1s increments, but does require experimentation. That is all there is to it. It has greatly reduced gas consumption in my ships when letting my son bang the sticks. Similar functionality can be used to soft start a pump on an ESC, for example. As far as holding an ON time, it becomes a bit more complex and as of right now, I have only figured out how to have three turrets on timers. to do this, you have to set up the following: (it is likely that one could get the same effect by creating a time based latching algorithm in the mixes page utilizing logical switches, delays, and slows, but I have not figured that one out yet) In Setup, set the three timers to ON, and set the number of seconds for the initial upon boot cannon disable (no way around this that I have found) set your logical switches for ON time per the previous section Set up one special function for each logical switch as shown below add three new logical switches as shown below (I show the three firing logical switches on my setup as well). Pay particular attention to matching the duration for the hold on switch and the delay for the associated timer switches for each firing channel, set up a mix similar to the following: Hopefully some find this useful.
