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
Thank Andre. Yes seems to wander around a lot more in 3.1.rc5 compared to 3.0. I think I noticed this as well. I wonder if 3.1.2.rcx will be better? Ive loaded it not my APM1 so was just curious what other are now doing and have found with APM 1 with this firmware.
Hi after tweaking my quad. i got better flying but still have problem in my loiter. my loiter still drifting. its lock in one place but keep moving in the locked area and sometime its drift away. please kindly help me to resolve my problem.
i use auto tune for my pid setting and the loiter PID i already change to 0.2 and the P 2.5 and the D 0.15 like the suggestion.
here the video of my copter in loiter mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_qmfRqTGQw
and this is i attach my log from that video
2014-04-04 18-29-32_19.log
Andre, NNormally it isn't necessary to change the loiter PIDs. I think those should be left at their default values
Randy, i think this is about the third time i have seen you post this. i personally get better Loiter performance by lowering this param. is there an alternative setting in the config of an aircraft that would mimic lowering Loiter PID and give the same performance? thanks in advance
Thor,
0.2 seems very low. I think it would be good to plot the NTUN message's desired velocity X and Y and compare to the actual velocity. My guess is that with a 0.2 P they won't track as well as they do at 1.0. I could be wrong but looking at the logs is the best way to be sure.
thank you i will check that out on one of my older logs and see how that graphs out
That's normal for that close to a building - you're probably not having a great GPS lock - check your hdop in the log - it should be under 2 for a good lock-in, and you should be far from buildings. Last night I had 14 satellites and it was really locked in.
@Andre....Based on your log 20140404182932_19.log, you do not have GPS lock...There's only a spike shown in your GPS graph. Check your log again.
Hello Andre
I've done a quick look at the logs.
they have a GPS error on line 6347-6350. Once the GPS is active failsafe. I would check the cable connections, and reduce vibration, as I see they have made autotune and have very niedriege R-values that can close on a soft frame.
greeting
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