Discussions

Hello all. I'm having a tough time arming my motors.  I was following the Configuration section of the Arducopter 2 wiki and made it all the way to ESC Calibration*.  I tried automatic calibration, but when I tried to test it as described at the bottom of the instructions, the motors wouldn't arm or spin.  So I tried calibrating again a few times, but no avail.  Then I noticed my green "A" LED wasn't lighting while in fly mode.  It lights solid when in CLI mode, and during the ESC calibration the A-B-C LEDs were lighting in sequence as expected.  I did some poking around the forums here and found a few other related** posts***, but none of the posted solutions seemed to work.  I even tried "letting it sit over night" a few times. :P

I know my motors work, since I can drive them individually by connecting the ESC's servo header to my RC's throttle output.  I know the motors will also run in unison as I accidentally left the throttle low during one ESC calibration attempt.  I found out during that flub that the motors will all spin uniformly if I give it a little throttle.

I don't know if this is related, but I'm also having trouble connecting to APM Planner (1.0.20) in flight mode for the flight data and related tabs.  The firmware and terminal tabs both work fine.  When I hit the "Connect" button, it eventually times out and complains that MAVlink was not present in the data stream.  Connecting works flawlessly and instantly in the Terminal.  The terminal reports my ArduCopter version as 2.0.30 Beta, firmware version 102.

Does anyone know what's going on?  I've been trying to figure this out all week now.

* http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/wiki/AC2_ESC

** http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/led-a-off

*** http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/problem-arming-my-arducopter