Hello everyone!
So im attempting to branch out in my rc adventures and get into multi rotors, so I've been building am f450 type quadcopter from the ground up. With it being my first quad I have been buying all clone or hk parts to keep cost down while I learn and inevitably will crash. Well yesterday I received by APM 2.6 clone board from deal extreme(ebay seller) with a ublox neo 6m gps, Excitedly I plugged it into my macbook pro which i had already downloaded mission planner onto, and that was the beginning of an 8 hour long troubleshooting nightmare...... At first I couldn't get the board to successfully reflect any data on the HUD after the initialization process and loading the firmware on for arducopter quad. After multiple attempts, i closed APM Planner, pressed the reset button on the board, and then tries the initialization process again. Amazingly, the board started to send data to the HUD. But then I was unable to get the compass to calibrate, after the 60 second time period it would just say "not enough data points logged" or something close to that. well either way I retried the initialization process multiple times and never quite got the compass to work properly, so then i tried to just complete all of the other mandatory set ups with accelerometer, radio, ect. all of them were working, but it continued to fail the pre arm check because of "unhealthy compass" Either way, somehow or another the board seemed to be working aside from the compass for a few hours and then at one point while i was testing the motors(not even exactly sure how i got them to arm) i realized i still needed to switch the two leads on my ccw motors, so i did that, and ever since then, i haven't been able to get anything out of my board. it won't connect to APM planner, if i try and initialize the setup and reinstall the arducopter quadcopter firmware it says "cannot access boot loader" and I'm just at a loss. Unfortunately I only have a mac at my house, so I can't currently test with mission planner, and i don't have any way to dual boot windows. So can anyone help? Is it a bad board? bad usb connection? Im just at a loss on how to pursue and trouble shoot from here. When I plug the usb cable into the board i get the green light solid, and red and blue ABC lights flashing. Since the motor polarity reset, i haven't seen the rx or tx light stay on at all, and only the rx light will faintly blink sometimes. please help. thank you.
Replies
Hi there
There is quite a couple of things you can try. Try using a different USB cable. I had trouble with my link to the board for a while at the beginning and then figured out that for some reason the board was not happy with the cable I used. I tried another one and that sorted the dodgy link out.
I'm also using a clone board and have had some issues with the compass calibration as well. The ting to remember when doing that is to rotate the craft around all it's axis. I found that calibrating everything on Mission Planner 1.3.7 is much better than on APM Planner 2.0.
I have had some trouble with the mac version of the Mission planner but have not had any trouble with the windows client. The other day I had a situation where the Mac client did not save values I set in the parameters to the board, even after I clicked save. When i power up the board again , the settings were just as they were before I changed the parameters. I dont know if it's something with the Mac client or just my link / machine. Perhaps someone else can shed some light on that.
The blinking red and blue is normal. Blinking red means the board is booted and waiting to be armed. Blinking Blue means it's waiting for GPS lock. Once the GPS lock is established, blue goes solid. Once the board is armed, red goes solid.
Changing the order or motor leads should not affect the connection to the board or any settings on the board as long as nothing is powered when you do it.
If the bootloader on the board has gone dodgy, there are ways to reload it although I have thankfully to had to do this yet.
https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/tree/master/Tools/APM2_2560_...
Perhaps the link above can help you.
I hope this helps a bit.
All the best and plz keep us posted.
Kind regards