Discussions

So  I recently got my homebrew quad flying waypoints with Xbee,  and today it decided to do something pretty weird. When I first plugged in the battery and got a link between xbees the artificial horizon was showing about 40 degrees nose up. After sitting for a minute (a literal 60 sec or so) it corrected itself back down to level. I took off and put it in loiter. I was fiddling with PID's while it slowly drifted off position, then all of the sudden it just pitched to about 20 degrees away from me and TOOK OFF! I engaged RTL, no go, I tried manually over riding the pitch, but full control did nothing.  So I bit the bullet and selected manual and power to zero. It ate it from about 50 feet into a field. Only minor damage, luckily. 

In the past I have noticed that sometimes if I hold in say a lot of forward pitch (like full deflection forward), when I let go it over corrects coming back to level. Additionally, sometimes I find myself holding close to full deflection pitch just to make it get back to me and if I let go it will rapidly go the other way. 

Its sounds similar to this from the wiki

After aggressive flying my copter leans to one side 10 - 30°

If after a lot of flying you find you need to hold your roll or pitch stick pretty far off center to keep your copter leve, ensure that your filter pads on the IMU are soldered as shown here. You can also tune up the drift correction in system.pde. Maybe .5 higher if needed. In the meantime, just land for 30 seconds, then continue flying.

I have checked the filter pads and they are soldered. 

What should I do?  I am hesitant to just throw new props on and try again as I easily could have caused a lot more damage to the helicopter or something else. 

APM 1 btw

Ted