Took my big quad out on a 2 x 4000 6S for a test, post-mumetal plate, and to test the gimbal. Came home frustrated.
1. Toilet bowl is back. Not as severe as last time, but I'm becoming far too familiar with the signs. I cut in early before it got silly. Same compassmot pre-mumetal, so looks like I need to run compassmot *again*. I *really hate* running compassmot. And no doubt another go at live compass. Grrr.
2., It's yaw-ing all over the place. I was chasing it all flight with trim. Do som manual yaw, and it would go away. Other times...it was like I still had the stick on. Did it in alt hold, and in the brief times of stab.
I'm *this close* to going back to 2.9.1 and flinging the mumetal because *everything worked* back then. It's just getting a bit silly now. I'm a family guy, and my time to fly is limited. I've spent more time in the last week debugging and recalibrating a previously perfect airframe than actually flying it. Now I've got to look at ferious rings and higher stacks. Why should I????
Is this the future of APM? "high maintenance" and harder to optimise? I hope not. Please tell me it get much easier, more reliable, less sensitive and more user friendly from here...
3. Unrelated to APM, my gimbal has decided to introduce a ton of jellies. Only change is re-stabilisation after attaching the video out cable to the gopro. More work there too, methinks.
Replies
Unfortunately you have to do compassmot all over again any time you do something to change the copter's magnetic field, such as adding mumetal shielding.
Can't wait for the APM 2.6 to give us an easy way out for magnetic interference.
Hi Ramsay,
I hope you can solve your problem.
Personally, I never feel APM performance as good as today on v3, even with 2.9 code.
I just spend ~ 1 hour to setup and another hour to tune the PID and it work like charm.
Chris point is very valid, IMHO if you don't want to use external mag then just put your APM higher and your save a lot of time fighting unnecessary battle.
I am putting my APM ~3 inch above all power cable and I have solid loiter as shown on my video below, it's dangerous test but worth to try :)
If you don't mount APM *very far* above magnetic noise sources, you will always have problems. We mount ours at least three inches above the PDB. Other flight controllers, such as the NAZA, mount it on a six-inch stalk.
There is really only so much software can do about magnetic noise. The best solution is always physical separation.