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
Hi Rainer,
check out this bug (I'm at this point convinced it's a bug - I crashed 9 drones with three different sets of hardware, two different radios, light conditions, etc.). The bug seems to occur when the origin and destination for auto-navigation are vertical to each other (I only tested destination above origin) and it especially manifests in RTL with positive altitude change. Symptoms are the same - a bit after the RTL command the nav system gets shot (like through a division to zero, but not sure where in the code) and loses control - eventually motors come down to some value (in my case, all come down to the same value eventually - around 1200 - sometimes 1200, sometimes 1231 sometimes 1241 - not sure what makes the difference, but they're all wrong all the same).
I tried to look at the code, but I don't know enough about APM to debug (what is a leash? a through point?)
http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/loiter-and-rtl-crashing-bug?c...
I'll check your log to see if you have the same symptoms.
Best,
Mihai
I've seen exactly that problem before. It was because light was hitting my barometer when the copter turned a certain direction. If your APM is not covered by something opaque you can put some black electrical tape over the area with the barometer and it should fix things right up.
Iuri - what frame do you have? Quad? Hex? Octo?
Hi Robert,
Which version are you using. Before 3.1.2 auto or loiter takeoff could randomly jump about 2 meters into the sky then come down by itself. Sometimes it would sometimes not. When it does this it doesn't disarm either and you cant disarm with yaw until you put it in stabilize.
However I tested and it seems that 3.1.2 and later are OK.
It is normal for Auto or Loiter takeoffs to stay put until about 50% and then raise up out of ground effect "fairly quickly", but not a strong jump. The idea is that it comes out of ground effect crisply. You'll find that it's much easier to take off cleanly this way.
So there are two things. the bug which seems to be corrected now (>= 3.1.2) but that JUMPS and then comes down by tself and
the normal smooth jump (raises up crisply about a meter, but under control) to clear ground effect.
i m glad some one is testing this in 3.1.2, that seems like a better way to take off in those modes. now i cant wait for 3.1.2 to get released!
Hi Just got my Pixhawk installed in a F800R hexacopter and first flights went well. but i noticed that after last flight gyros was offset by 15 degrees..so for ex. fwd pitch was 15 deg to the left...
Tried an autocal flight but aborted because it did not fly well when correcting. When I landed the gyro was slightly tilted in missionplanner.
Made a new compassmot and. Recalibrated gyros and then the gyro went totally crazy...recalibrated again same thing. Gyros are spinning, baro is crazy and gps is all over the place... se attatched video...Help!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWI2n3rxMso
Also the calibration went wrong file attatched
Calibration went wrong.tlog
Ronny, I managed to get my Pixhawk into the same predicament by running compass mot. (don't run it on the Pixhawk)
The HUD was spinning and I couldn't do a level calibrate or a compass calibrate. Trying to fly was out of the question.
The fix was to do a command line reset to dump the code and then reload the firmware with mission planner. (to speed the process, save your PIDs (I just wrote them down) and re- key them before trying to fly again). Perhaps its obvious, but you will also need to do a new setup for compass calibration, radio calibration, and accellerometer calibration, but the whole process takes only a few minutes.
The root cause of your issue may not be the conflict with compass mot, i.e. you may have a hardware issue, but the symptoms appears identical, and this "fix" is painless and worked for me. Let me know if it works for you.
Steve
Thanks for verifying that Steve!
Just made it out by myself... Have been in my garage all evening and...
1. Disconnected the compas and all was stable
2. Tried to re-calibrate (the reconnected) compass calibration-failed
3, Made a command line setup , erase eeprom and a new setup calibration and now it is back on track again.
No more compasmot....
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