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
When I downloaded it, it was the final release. I just picked the latest firmware from the MS and loaded it.
I am not sure which one to go by right now. Hopefully someone will let you know...
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 will wait to hear what Randy says about this issue. Since most people still fly APM 2.x, I guess this bug(if there is) never discovered.
Strange loiter for tri-copter. After lots of flying and testing with my tri-copter. Stabilize, RTL, Land -> very good. However I found this strange thing in Loiter. When switching to loiter, it stays in place very good, but... when turning slowly the tri loses a lot of height when the tail points towards North. This only happens in this direction and has a very narrow band. All other directions are fine. When doing faster turn in loiter, when the tail hits North, the tri drops and than recovers fast after being past the North. This is can be reproduced reliable.
Anyone has a clue what can happen here? Other than this, the tri flies like a charm, has hardly any vibrations.
Oh, and I'm flying 3.12 stable
Regards,
Walter
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.
Hello Scott,
I tested the tri. covered the APM with dark tape. This really did the trick! Now flying very stable also in Loiter. Alt Hold also is better now. This thing had me puzzled some time. Thanks!
Walter
Thanks for your quick response. I'll check that. My APM is partly shielded by the Ublox GPS above it, and the baro also has some coverage by some foam.
I'll post the results.
Tnx!
I second that. Make sure your APM is not directly exposed to sunlight on any side.
Also to make sure this is your problem or not, try to do that hover test at noon time when the sun is at top. So you know turning to any direction will not fluctuate the amount of light hitting your APM...
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