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
Sorry I don't know what version he is running. But it is new within the last 6 months. Its odd to watch during fpv. All the sudden it goes to zero pitch and stops. You can put full forward in and nothing happens. turn around and back to normal! I think it is a pretty cool feature to have. It will let you go to the boundary and still leave you with control. So if you know your range you will never trigger a radio failsafe. It would come in handy when not flying in open areas where the failsafe trigger could cause a flight and impact into something. Like hilly areas, areas with towers, lines etc. Or areas you do not want to fly over on the way back. The failsafe brings it straight line back which could be a problem.
If it works the way you describe, I think it is very useful for FPV. It would keep you within radio range as you said.
Why don't you raise a ticket for this feature so it would be added to APM.
I am sure it would very easy to add most of the functionality is already there...
It think it doesn't work that way (yet). And I don't think it would be a problem to add that functionality.
Fence is a good function but I have read enough problems about it. Not due to the function itself but due to the GPS issues causing it do weird things. So I avoid using it. If I somehow get in trouble and need the copter to take over to fly back as a last resort, I just initiate the RTL manually...
Why not that Fence should depend in your transmitter signal? I think that's better.
I think the problem with that is you don't really know how far your transmitter signal reaches. I agree its good to have it stopped or RTL if it reaches the signal limit which is a built in Failsafe option in APM anyway.
But for use in a geofence in some situations the transmitter signal might go much further beyond what it might be specified at. For example if your transmitter range is advised to be at 3 kilometers ,yet in a optimal circumstances it just happens to reach 8 kilometers, which is possible, then it could fly there into an area that might not a good for people, the copter and so on. Its better to have a set known fence limitation for geofencing.
So it should be Transmitter Signal Failsafe? what do you think?
Jay there is already the option in APM to set up a Transmitter fail safe. If the copter looses contact with the transmitter it can be set to either land or RTL. But the Geofence has a lot more advantages because you can control the limitations yourself, where as using Transmitter range, you cannot and done usually know how far its range is.
The use of a Geofence is so you can choose exactly how far out and high you can restrict the copters flight. You have full control of setting this to suit your needs and environment. Where as using Transmitter range as the safety fence you have no control of how far those stop point will be.
I think that failsafe works differently. This time its not a total lost of pwm signal.
Are many people still using the sonar on this version? Also how well is it working on APM1 boards if any one out there has them running on this firmware?
I have a sonar on my APM1 quad. I haven't flown it for a long while but I found that a sonar_gain of 0.6 works the best for me, however it's nowhere as good as in the previous versions. Have a look here - https://vimeo.com/81257936
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