This was kind of scary.
Pixhawk, APM 3.0.3 plane, I was testing stuff on the bench, the prop was not armed, I verified I could not turn it on with the remote and APM planner said "disarmed"
I then tried 'preflight reboot' and this caused the throttle to go full bore for 10sec while the pixhawk was rebooting, and then it stopped on its own and became unresponsive again (as expected) since APM rebooted back to disarmed mode (although the servos were active after reboot).
I can reproduce at will.
By the way, Is there an arduplane 3.x forum, or is this the right place?
Replies
Hi Marc,
The problem will be your RC1_TRIM value. You have your throttle on channel one I think, and the default value of RC1_TRIM is 1500. While booting the plane sets the failsafe values of all channels to the RCn_TRIM values. Check all of your RCn_TRIM values and make sure they are appropriate for your channel ordering.
Cheers, Tridge
I moved my motor back to RC3 to avoid other problems and bugs, and indeed RC3_TRIM is 1500
Is that a sane/safe default? The default of 1500 I got seems dangerous.
Oh, I see, by moving the motor back to channel 3, whatever sets the TRIM didn't reset RC3_TRIM to a low value, and that's how I ended up with that.
If so, then it shouldn't affect others and it's just an unfortunate byproduct of my moving the channel mapping twice.
By the way, if my pixhawk is connected via USB for programming and getting power from the servo rail, what's the best way to reboot it? Do I need to unplug both USB (and lose my ttyACM port, what a pain) and the battery connected to the ESC each time?
Hi Marc,
You can send a software reboot to the Pixhawk. I'm not sure how to do that in APM Planner - have a look at the menus.
btw, given you are a Linux user and used to command line interfaces, you may prefer to use MAVProxy:
http://tridge.github.io/MAVProxy/
MAVProxy is a GCS written in python. It is good for experienced users. In MAVProxy you would type "reboot" to reboot the Pixhawk.
Cheers, Tridge