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
I looked at your header on the upload
Flight time 6 minutes, at 1300 meters
Is your quad in visual sigt at 1300meters?
I have flown over water at 1000 Meters but at 38 minutes time
What is your clime rate in m/s
That is not MSL altitude reporting. I was at 100 feet AGL.
Well I loaded the latest up and I am not to happy. It flies fine till I try auto and then it has a gps glitch and goes stupid. I had this machine flying perfect at 3.0.1 many auto flights perfect loiter etc.. I did back up settings and did compare and the only thing I see is INS_GYROFFS_Z was 0.00211647 and the new value 0.001807845. I think this whole gps glitch deal might be the issue and I am going to run a test flight with it turned off.
Ok I disabled the gps glitch and flew 2 missions back to back (fresh batteries for both) zero issues take off and rtl 4 waypoints each mission. I like your guys thinking for this glitch deal but when I had problems it was all due to having that crummy internal compass after that its always flown perfect. So until something a little more "tested" in my eyes comes out I am going to keep the gps glitch off.
I think GPS Glitch can save you from some really bad situations, especialy with auto missions....this way if your gps is gone your multi will fly away in only God known direction GKD....
John,
If you provide a log or parameter file we can have a look at the GPS glitch values you're seeing. I think the GPS Glitch protection is fairly well tested so it's more likely to be a config issue.
I've uploaded the new firmware (AC3.1.3), however, I wasn't able to arm it. I try to disable the pre-arm check but still luck. Any idea what's the problem? Before I uploaded this the FW AC3.1.3-rc1 works perfectly for this copter. :(
Anyone has an idea why this happening on AC3.1.3?
Try calibrating your radio again and also do esc's/motors calibration.
Thanks Willy.
I've just found the problem. My save parameter won't work in AC3.1.3 (this parameter flies well in AC3.1.3-RC1). Is that normal? I don't think so.
Resolution: Reinstall the firmware!
I just hope our developers are working on this now. It's just prostrating because since AC3.1.2 there's a lot of fw problems and bugs encountered, one biggest headache this time is the Mission Planner .99.
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