After months of testing AC3.1 is finally available in the Mission Planner and GitHub.
Warning #1: If the vehicle is left landed (but armed) while in AltHold or Loiter mode for more than a few seconds, the vehicle may suddenly jump into the air the moment the pilot raises the throttle above zero. The reason is the baro altitude may fall while the vehicle is sitting on the ground. In AC3.2 this bug is fixed because we reset the target before take-off.
Warning #2: Motors will spin (slowly) by default as soon as the copter is armed! You can switch this feature off by setting the MOT_SPIN_ARMED parameter to zero.
Warning #3: if you see "Bad Gyro" on the HUD then you may have a blown 3.3V regulator. See this thread for details.
Warning #4: if you use a sonar set the SONAR_GAIN parameter to 0.8 or lower
Warning #5: Trad Heli users should now connect their main rotor ESC to APM's RC8 output
Warning #6: Trad Heli BUG causes loss of collective control in ACRO mode if swash type set to flybarred (i.e. not flybarless). Will be fixed in AC3.2.
The major improvements over AC3.0.1 are (full list here):
1. Pixhawk support (Tridge & PX4 development team)
2. Autotune of Roll and Pitch gains (Leonard/Randy)
3. Drift mode (Jason)
4. Improved Acro (Rob/Leonard) and new Sport mode (Leonard)
5. Arming, Take-off, Land in Loiter or AltHold
6. TradHeli improvements (Rob) including:
a) support for direct drive tail rotors
b) smoother ramp-up of main rotor
c) reduced collective for better control in stabilize mode (STAB_COL_MIN, STAB_COL_MAX params)
7. Support for SingleCopter (Bill King)
8. Performance improvements resolve AltHold troubles for Hexa & Octacopters
9. Safety Improvements:
a) GPS Glitch detection (Randy)
b) Motors spin when armed (Jonathan Challinger)
c) crash detector shuts off motors if copter flipped for 2secs
d) batt failsafe option to RTL instead of LAND, gps failsafe option to trigger AltHold instead of Land
e) more pre-arm checks of inertial nav speed,
10. Bug fixes:
a) optical flow working again (although performance is still not great because not integrated with inertial navigation)
b) ROI working (use DO_SET_ROI command)
How to upgrade:
Click on the MissionPlanner's Initial Setup >> Install Firmware screen. The version numbers should appear as "ArduCopter-3.1", then click the appropriate frame icon and it should upgrade as per usual.
Special thanks to Marco and the many beta testers on the AC3.0.1 thread who put their copters at risk during the testing of this new version and uncovered many problems so that you don't have to! Here are some of their videos: loiter in wind, patio sonar, autotune, autotune2, roi, beach, acro, vrbrain, tricopter, train spotting, radio failsafe, the tree, double loiter
If you haven't seen it recently, please check out the ArduCopter wiki.
Feel free to post comments below and we're going to use the new APM Forum for support issues so please post your support requests there.
Replies
Do I understand ROI correctly?
1. Must be set after at least one normal waypoint is entered.
2. Persists only until the next waypoint is reached and then is reset.
3. The ROI command in the WP type drop list in Mission Planner should NOT be used...use the Set ROI feature of the map....
Thank you guys. 3.1 is a real treat to fly :-) Did my first flight in drift mode and it was great fun! Always though that althold was my favourite but this just takes the cake. Excellent stuff!
How do I set Drift Mode to one of my switch positions from Mission Planner, there seems to be no selection for Drift mode?
When upgrading from 3.0.1 to 3.1, must we do the compassmot? (Or does the eeprom keep the previous compassmot offsets?)
With APM Copter V3.1 the gps accuracy is really good, many of us have not noticed but these two images show the takeoff and land point in my video, the error is less than a meter, considering the wind, the bad weather and how overwork the accelerometers during the flight it's a good result.
This accuracy is of course also linked to other factors, including a good hardware and almost perfect tuning.
Takeoff:
Land:
really appreciate the time put into this, thank you.
I'm happy to see the Y6 alternate configuration is included (set FRAME = 10). I don't see another mention of it other than the release notes, and am hoping someone can clarify:
-has this been tested by anyone?
-are there any special considerations?
-is this the preferred configuration way for a Y6?
thank you again for the amazing work!
Randy, could you please enlighten us regarding 10b "DO_SET_ROI" ?
I could't get it to work, nor I am sure how to.
There's a ready thread on this subject here: http://ardupilot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=5120
Anyway - Thank you.
For some odd reason I can connect with 433 3DR radio's to v3.1rc8 but not to this v3.1 final version, parameters are all the same and the radio settings too.
How can that be?
Marco,
Thanks for the 3.1 video with the flight mode demos.
Forgive me if this has been answered before, but can you share with us your flight mode switch setup, and your reasoning for your switch choices and the relationship between the various switches?
Thanks!
This looks great. Thanks to the team and testers. I can hardly wait to try it out.
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