Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Graham Miller on June 15, 2012 at 6:26am

Hi guys,

I have just uploaded the new ver 2.6 to my APM2 and its working a treat also noticed it loads a lot quicker with the MP Nav1

great work and cant wait to get this into the air and report back :-) keep up the great work.

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DistributorPermalink Reply by UnmannedTechShop.co.uk on June 15, 2012 at 9:07am

It just keeps getting better :-) Congrats  to all the developers

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Permalink Reply by Rick Stewart on June 15, 2012 at 9:42am

Is the optical flow sensor supported in this version?

Rick

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by Andreas M. Antonopoulos on June 15, 2012 at 2:24pm

Yes, it has been supported for a couple of versions now.

The soldering is a bit kludgy on an APM2, but it does work.

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Permalink Reply by John Hanson on June 15, 2012 at 10:36am

Wow!  Just tried rtl and watched it land ON the takeoff spot. So far, I have had only 1 bug-

I have had this happen several times. I load a mission, then fly around, and at some point the mission gets corrupt. I did have good missions if I loaded and then flew right away,

Typically I load something like this-

 

 

After loading, I can read waypoints and it is fine. But after flying a couple batteries, it looks like this-

Is this happening when I change batteries? Or (I do have ch7 waypoint save enabled) is it getting a phony ch7 at boot? I will disable ch7 and try to duplicate.

I am confused as to what ch7 does to an existing mission - is there a way to clear the mission and do a new ch7 mission without a laptop?

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Permalink Reply by Luke on June 15, 2012 at 10:54am

Fantastic job, devs! 2.6 is absolutely amazing. I'm dying to give it a solid FPV test! I'm still having a problem though that keeps my confidence low.

I had initially thought my twitchy/jerky pitch problem (http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/tricopter-occasional-but-often-dr...) on my tri had gone away, as the first 8 minutes of flight with 2.6 release were rock solid. Near the end of the battery life (I get 10-11 with the 3.6Ah battery I was flying) it started happening again. Very slight, almost imperceptible, until just before the batt levels got low enough that I shut it down.

At that point there was one very visible, but not destructive twitch on the pitch (tail jerks down as if I flicked the stick). I just flew a full 5.8Ah battery (17 minutes of hover) and about half-way through I started seeing twitches, mostly in pitch but once or twice in roll as well. As I posted as a comment to my problem thread above, it seems to happen only if I'm putting tiny corrective stick movements to maintain location in hover. If I leave the sticks alone, I never see the issue (nor do I see it when aggressively flying so far).

I removed every single piece of non-essential gear (all video TX/OSD, second BEC for powering input rail, telemetry radio, etc.), I swapped channels on the TX/RX, etc. tuned pitch rate_P from 0.8 to 2.5, removed _D, etc. and nothing eliminated the problem.

Any thoughts? I'll record some video of it happening and capture a tlog of the same event and upload it to the original thread. I had a bad crash due to a very violent twitch that brought the copter down hard and I've been terrified to go higher than 6ft since.

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Permalink Reply by Dave C on June 15, 2012 at 11:24am

Sound like you've eliminated most of the tuning/code issues, through the tuning you've done Could it be a motor getting hot and faltering? Have you done a quick battery change to see if it still does is at the start of the second battery?

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Permalink Reply by Luke on June 15, 2012 at 11:32am

Given the behavior that it seemed to happen more frequently at the end of the flight I thought the same thing. I have completely replaced the ESC for the tail, and I swapped the motor with another arm, so I don't believe it was a faulty bit of hardware. I thought perhaps the ESC (Turnigy 18A) or motor (DT750) is just not specced well enough to operate in this position (long shot, but thought maybe the rear motor gets a higher work-out than the other two), but I flew these with multiwii and KK pretty aggressively without a single problem. The motors and ESCs are actually barely warm to the touch after the hover test too.

Also, the problem before 2.6 was almost immediate, I could get it to twitch within 60 seconds then. I've got video and tlogs of that, I just need to trim down the video as its one long test session. I'm also going out to fly again now, so I'm going to try to capture 2.6 video/logs so I'm up to date. :)

In those logs, I see what appears to be a radio_in spike on ch2, which is something Glenn was seeing as well. His went away with 2.6, so I was hopeful something had changed.

I'll try switching out for a second battery right away and see if I can corroborate or discount a heat issue. Thanks for the suggestion!

 

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DeveloperPermalink Reply by R_Lefebvre on June 15, 2012 at 12:48pm

Please get post some flash logs, most importantly, enable PID logging, and set Ch6 to tune pitch control, that way it will log the pitch control data.  Very important.

I wonder if what's happening is your PID settings are stable when the battery is fresh, but as power droops with the bat voltage, you are getting some instability maybe due to your I term.  If your I term is too high, it might be OK normally, but you only get into instability when motor power drops.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on June 15, 2012 at 3:34pm

I attached a video and tlog (it's all I have of my first example) to a commend in the other thread: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/tricopter-occasional-but-often-dr...

Honestly looking at the logs again, I'm having difficulty understanding what was cause and what was effect. There are strange anomalies like an xacc spike for the first jerk, but not the second. In both cases there's a fairly large corresponding input (ch2) change, even though I was at most moving the stick a percentage of a degree to maintain hover.

I'm charging up batteries again, and will try logging as you suggest, thanks for the suggestion.

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Permalink Reply by Rui Manuel Cravo Marques on June 15, 2012 at 11:43am

Do you have STAB I with any value ? if so, set it to 0 and give it a try.

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Permalink Reply by Luke on June 15, 2012 at 3:41pm

In 2.6 release I've got the default (0.1 I believe?). When I was diagnosing the problem with 2.6 Delta and before, I had tried dropping the stab I factor and rate D factor to zero. I also was experiencing the twitch in acro-only mode which I had assumed eliminated the stab PID settings completely. I've not tried anything but defaults in 2.6 release however, so I've got some repeat experimenting to do, and I'll try eliminating STAB I again now.

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