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
Randy, are you using s.bus with your futaba? After upgrade to 3.1 my PX4 doesn't reconize s.bus signal anymore, If I flash 3.01 back it will work again. Is there anything I need to do to make it work?
Another query - The safety switch - is it really that big? I've no idea how I'm going to mount that...
It's what I was going to do, as my rigs are 6S and don't use a PM.
Here my first video with Pixhawk revision 2.4 and APM Copter V3.1.
Bests, Marco
Im very impressed by how arducopter 3.1 performed RTL & auto-landing. The copter was very steady in 20kph + winds.
Third Aircraft Up and Running with 3.1 & default settings, this time an OCTO-QUAD. Everything flies great out of the box. Theoretically, if you're flying good up & out of the box, Does Auto Tune do anything for me that makes things Better? are there unrealized optimizations from the Defaults? (I am asking from the "If it aint Broke, dont fix it Camp" Camp)
In Mission Planner is it possible to setup Channel 6 Trim for PID Pitch and Roll individually. I can only see settings for PID tuning pitch and Roll together
Thanks
David Ardis
hello
how to desactivate the crash detector or change its parameters?
So we've found a little bug in AC3.1 just now. The symptom is that you arm and take-off in Loiter and it acts like AltHold. So it holds altitude but you find that you have full control of the roll and pitch angles.
To reproduce the problem you can do this:
1. turn on the TX with the flight mode switch already in Loiter mode position
2. power the APM/PX4/Pixhawk
3. arm and take-off in Loiter
If somewhere between steps #1 ~ #3 you move the flight mode switch the problem doesn't appear.
We've fixed it already in master and I expect we will push out an AC3.1.1 release within the next 2 weeks.
Special thanks to Ron Hogwarts for finding and reporting this bug in the forums.
Happy New Year to everyone. I just got done testing the new 3.1 and its working great along with the my sonar. I left it at 0.8 but noticed before changing over it was at 0.2 and it was not reliable (3.0.1) unless you felt like dropping 20 feet to the ground. Anyhow I have caught the problem before because of my ninja reflexes and saved the machine from any bumps and figured well if it was going to do it again I would be ready but its spot on at 0.8 and I walked under it and it gained alt as it should. Also tested Stab/Loiter/Auto/RTL all worked very well. I ran 2 short auto missions with 4 way points no issues. I did set the gps glitch to alt hold instead of land because who knows what would be under the machine so I figured it would be safer to do this.
Great work and I will be testing drift and ROI soon enough in a couple photo shoots.
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