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
This's Hexacopter from my customer. He want install with Pixhawk. after setup and tune is very stable.
I have no problems with guided Mode.APM and Pixhawk works fine in 3.1.rc2. Follow me at 3.01 APM no problems. 3.1 not tried yet.
http://youtu.be/sQrlqXQ5O8g
greeting
I mean first time and change new position before go to old position only. It have swing.
I have tried this morning with Pixhawk no problems. Copter in Loiter new position on laptop, copter goes to the new location. waiting for new position.
No problems
greeting
Rainer
Hi Randy,
I will report to you about Bug with change to Guided mode. When i will change to Guided (Click Fly to here with Map on MP) my quad, It like jerky or over swing on the air. And sometime, I have change Position is before move to lasted point. It have break and almost a backflip. But, Today i have loiter so longtime is no have problem and after change to Guided mode is have jerky and backflip have crash. I very lucky not damage on my quad.
I can't sent my log. Because, I used Pixhawk my logs have big size about 12 MB.
Randy
I attached my log have crash with Guided mode on Google drive.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9RZbAMTlAOdc2tiUURuRkowNlU/edit
This is during bench testing on pixhawk with 3.1.2rc1(or whatever is the freshest). With roll 180 on the ahrs.
Some advice please:
1) My Alt_hold is good but I feel it could be a little better. There's quite a bit of height lost in forward flight which is regained again when stopping. (APM2.5 is cased and baro covered and shaded).
Current settings are:
Alt hold P - 1.0, Thr accel - P - 0.75, I - 1.50, D - 0.010, IMAX - 6.500 (no longer sure of what the defaults were).
2) Loiter is very good but fidgety, even in low wind, it always twitching slightly. Other videos I've seen of 'copters in Loiter show a much smoother ride than mine.
My Loiter settings are: Loiter PID - 1.0, Rate Loiter P - 1.0, I - 0.500, D - 0.012, IMAX - 3.0, Loiter speed - 800.
What can I change to improve things?
AC 3.1.2-rc1 (release candidate) is now available in the Mission Planner's Beta Firmwares link.
There are no changes for the APM2 (beyond the firmware name) but it fixes a potentially serious bug for Pixhawk.
We found that if the Pixhawk board temperature climbed above 65 degrees C then some boards would see the altitude readings jump by 200m. If you were in altHold, Loiter or Auto this could cause the copter to descend very rapidly. The fix increases the input-output pin speed settings so they can keep up with the high cpu <-> baro communication rate.
Many thanks to Darrell Burkey for supplying the log file that found this bug.
Got some flying in over the long weekend. This thing is locked in so nice with 3.1
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