Just flew 2.8 and once again, WOW. Things that are noticably better than 2.73--
Loiter is spot on, used to 'wander' ervery now and then, now hangs on a string.
I did not see any simple mode probs - instead, for real fun, put in alt hold and push yaw to the extreme- the thing will twirl at an INCREDIBLE speed while it flies!
Altitude hold is great - the motors used to pulse, now smooth and very accurate.
By the way, the only params I changed from default for my quad (10x4.7, 880kv) were altitude hold and throttle rate, both up to .65. I have seen some complaints about dropping on alt hold, never hurts to bring these up.
A WORD TO THE WISE- I can't believe I have fallen for this at least twice!! When you get ready to lift off, listen to the beeps and watch the props! Always pulse the throttle a bit and watch the props. If they do not start smoothly at the same time (or beeps are not synchronous) DO NOT FLY!!!!!
It fools me every time by seeming like after a 'rough start', it settles down and you think can go, but DO NOT! A motor or ESC will fail within a couple of minutes, and it will plunge from the sky. Fix the problem before taking off.
Along those lines, the software is now getting so freaking good that motors and ESC will be the biggest failure items (and maybe my bad piloting skills) from now on. I have over 100 air hours on my 880kv motors, and the wear is extremely noticable vs. a new one. Of course, I ignored the ragged startup and am paying for it in props.
It would be cool to have a 'total airtime' meter in the software - this is aviation and at certain lifetimes parts should be replaced before they fail .A 'motor run time figure' sure would help to schedule maintenance.
Thanks to all - we are not worthy! Jason, if your balancing robot works this well we are well on the way to an autonomous world!
Replies
Great idea, I second that! something stored separately that could be saved under different model names in case you fly more than 1 copter... not sure how you will read and assign the particular flight time to a model but even if done manually that would still be a good start. I keep a written log of my LiPo charges and estimated number or hours of flight per frames that I have (got a beater for testing releases and got a nicer one to casual / video flight)
So if Mission Planner could centralize that information (even if at first it's just manual) that would be super!
But then the second thing to do would be to save the info in a cloud/dropbox type of thing as I use many computer/instance of Mission planner depending where/what I do...
I can see this a nice feature in the long run!
Dany CanadaDrones
I like the idea of a "Hobbs Meter" to simply count the time with the throttle above idle. This should be a permanent parameter that isn't affected by firmware changes. If you want to know how long a motor has been running, or how old are the props, then keep an airframe log.