Hello all, after losing my radio signal today, i'm wondering what this "circle" mode is. it doesn't actually execute a circle as in loiter, but it does have a slight aileron offset. there seems to be very little mention of this mode (and generally no information on its characteristics) anywhere.
I also didn't find a way to disable/shorten the 20 seconds of signal lost before kicking into RTL. when i lost signal earlier today i watched the FPV footage as the plane skimmed over treetops and barely skimming/missing/passing between buildings before RTL kicked in and got the plane to 100m altitude heading back home. I mean... it takes a 2-second signal loss to kick into circle, and then 20 seconds from circle to RTL. I'm pretty sure that by 5 seconds of signal loss I'd rather have it go RTL than into a mode which i can't seem to find what it does...
so does anyone know the supposed characteristics of "Circle" mode, and whether it's possible to disable this or change the duration of signal loss before RTL kicks in? preferrably within mission planner?
thx
Replies
My experience is a bit different.
I fly on a low altitude (20-50m), and the things that I wish to see in the filesave is:
1. Ability to set timeout (from 0 to ...) to go to the first fs action.
2. Ability to set as many fs actions as user want.
3. Ability to set the duration of each action.
4. Ability to set any mode on any action.
IMHO these things can make the APM filesave function very flexible.
In my case against of the CIRCLE mode I need the LOITER mode on the specified altitude which triggers immediately after the RX looses the signal and then after some time it should go to the RTL. The key thing I need is to climb up immediately after the RX looses the signal, otherwise the model can easily go to the planet because of the low altitude)
So I hope to see the changes in the feature.
Regards to the developers.
Hi Aleck,
The CIRCLE mode is explained in the flight modes documentation (you may have missed it as it was only updated recently).
I agree that the timeouts should be settable, so I've added FS_SHORT_TIMEOUT and FS_LONG_TIMEOUT parameters for the upcoming 2.74 release. See the new parameters here
Thanks for the suggestion!
Cheers, Tridge
Hi Aleck
The Failsafe behaviour is well described here http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/arduplane-setup/apms-failsafe-funct...
Tridge pointed out your post to me and he is going to add 2 parameters:
FS_LONG_TIMEOUT and FS_SHORT_TIMEOUT, to make the two time thresholds settable.