Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damian ONeill on March 12, 2012 at 7:27pm

Hi I'm no expert, but on the page where you setup which hardware you will use (Sonar, Compass) just above the Declination setting is put is a button to Calibrate compass.

You wave it in all axis and it gives you a number to enter.

I couldn't work out where to enter the number. Let me know if you find out.

Hope that helps a bit

• ▶ Reply

DeveloperPermalink Reply by Randy on March 12, 2012 at 10:55pm

Yes, there's two ways to calibrate the compass, one is to just fly it around and let the "automatic offset nulling" code do it's magic.  I believe after about 4 mins of flying about and then landing and disarming your motors it will save your offsets to eeprom.  You can see if it's succeeded in saving the offsets by connecting your APM to your computer via the mini-USB port, and then looking in the APMissionPlanner's Flight Data screen, down at the bottom left you'll see a status tab and in there amongst all the many other values sent from the APM you should see mag_off_x, mag_off_y and mag_off_z values (or something like that).  They should be non-zero and somewhere between 20 ~ 100 although some people see some offsets as high as 250 if they've got metal objects near their compass.

 

I haven't personally used the calibration routine in the latest Mission Planner but I've heard Robert from the trad heli dev team give it a try and it seemed to produce similar results to the automatic nulling method.

 

hope that helps.

• ▶ Reply