Discussions

Hi Guys,

I’ve recently assembled a jDrones ArduCopter 2 quad, but I’m having some strange issues getting it flying.

The 1 and 2 motors (“+” configuration) work great.  They stabilize the copter when I roll it by hand and they speed up/slow down as they should in response to inputs from the right stick on the transmitter.  The 3 and 4 motors don’t respond correctly to changing the pitch of the copter by hand (sometimes the speed remains constant and other times it actually speeds the wrong motor – increasing the pitch angle instead of leveling it).  Also, the 3 and 4 motors don’t respond at all to moving the right stick on the transmitter.  However, all four motors respond properly to throttle input from the transmitter.

When I went through the config steps in the Mission Planner, everything seemed to work fine.  The artificial horizon was consistent with the attitude I held the copter in, and the tuning window responded correctly to pitch, roll, and yaw with all three values returning near zero with the copter still and level.  I did notice that the yaw value in the Status tab under the Artificial Horizon was taking various non-zero values at rest (sometimes around 50, sometimes around 80, etc) while Pitch and Roll were within a few tenths/hundreds of zero -- I'm not sure if that's any indication of a problem or not.

The transmitter calibration went fine and everything seemed to respond correctly (although I did have to reverse the Roll and Yaw radio inputs).  I tried three different releases of the Mission Planner from two different computers, and that didn’t seem to make any difference.  I re-calibrated the ESCs manually (twice) and ran the motor test from the CLI.  Everything seemed fine.

It just seems really strange to me that one axis works perfectly and the other behaves fairly randomly.  Could it be a hardware problem?  Anything else I can try?

THANKS!

Jeff