anyone have any experience with trying to make returns to 3dr?
i have the APM 2.5 and it is pretty defective... not sure if this is a fluke or just poor design though.
i noticed that in loiter my quad would just climb and climb and climb. thought maybe i could fix it by tuning PIDs and isolating vibrations (i have the F450 frame so its pretty noisy), but this is not the case.
i tested it with all motors off simply connected to my laptop with the usb cable and left it sitting on a table outside for about five minutes and the altitude reading steadily dropped all the way down to about 176m from 197m before i disconnected and came back in.
obviously this makes any sort of auto functionality completely unusable and i am lucky i did not watch my quad fly off into the distance. has anyone else encountered this defect? and if so were you successful in getting a refund?
another thing i noticed is that when i tilted the quad at all the altitude would jump around by +/- 5 meters or so suggesting that its a gps issue. i have the mediatek 2.0. but pos hold works great so im not buying that a ublox would solve anything.
it seems that there is no way to switch to barometer only readings? not sure if this would help either, but seems like maybe it could...
Replies
Hi Anton,
You may be right, but keep in mind what you are looking at is a barometer that actually measures air pressure.
I live in an area on California's North Coast where the air pressure can easily vary as much as you have described and this is one of the problems with using air pressure for determining altitude.
In normal full sized airplanes it doesn't generally matter as much because you are relying on visual reference to the ground when you are landing.
You always need to correct your altimeter for the current air pressure before you take off at your location by resetting the altitude to the known field altitude.
The air pressure would generally change the same amount whether the plane was indoors or outdoors.
What you describe is actually a legitimate condition for normal changing of air pressure in relation to a weather front.
The jump thing when tilted is not likely to be related to GPS, rather rate PIDs or some other PID.
It should definitely not "jump" that much and is a good indication something is screwed up with the PIDs.