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 Randy
Yup cool alright ! lol .. At the moment I am only using the throttle cut switch on my transmitter , to activate the spray pump, but plan to use something like "do digi control or do servo control" So the Pixhawk will activate the spray when requested in a flight plan.
P.s I am still using 3.1.5 code not 3.2 .. I don't know why the internal compass is faulty .. So you think its just software based issue?
One of my biggest challenge's with what I what to achieve with my UAV's
Is having Precise altitude control when flying over Orchards and RTK Gps such as Piksi, So the machine stays on target .. Hopefully the team (you guys) will have a solution worked out in the near future ..
cheers Reuben
Reuben,
The sprayer is available in AC3.1.5, it's just disabled by default. I'll try and put up a wiki page to describe how to use it.
The internal compass calibration not working is a mission planner issue which MichaelO will sort out shortly. There's an issue in arducopter which can mean the wrong offsets can be used though which I will fix.
-Randy
Hi Randy,
I do not have a Pixhawk. Does Pixhawk have an internal compass?
I thought after APM 2.6, no on-board compass used on flight control systems... Perhaps I am wrong...
Just asking...
Thanks
Thanks Randy for your swift reply as always .... I dont have any metal on the mount for the PH infact the only thing was near buy was the usb lead .. The end though was placed at the rear of the PH but the lead it self passed in front of the PH ... BUT it was flying fine .. I only noticed the Mag field was week ( since I found out it was due to the usb lead which i have now removed ) but the internal compass refuses to calibrate only showing data on one axis .. Strange how it was fine for many flights tests then out of the blue no more Loiter .. works now with the external compass , but I would still like to know why the internal one is dead ??
Reuben,
I don't think the compass is dead. If you check the flight data screen's status tab and look for mx, my, mz I think you'll see that all three are updating. The pic above showing only one part of the sphere being filled in is because of very large offsets I think. There have been some changes in the mission planner recently to deal with large offsets so I think it must be related.
before i changed to the external compass I did a CLI compass test I saw that it was not outputting correctly when turning the frame ? would this be similar to looking at the status tab ?
I also noticed that the Heading in the HUD was not moving .. when turning the copter it would move briefly then come back to roughly where is was before .. Mostly likely due to the accelerometers inertia ..
incidentally i have just built another machine and it has APM on board but that one too will not loiter ..takes off in any direction when Loiter is engaged .. compass calibration seemed to go well on that one .. perhaps this is all to do with MP .. but does not explain why all of a sudden on the PH the compass only works on one axis ? I know you say it high off sets .. but i have zero'd these and done erase reset but still no joy..
Hi Ravi, try first Motorsync with Pixhawk/Afro/motors.
might be useful to find out sync issue with your esc's.
Do you use ground of PWM signal connected ?
Ciao - Giuseppe
Ravi,
I've had same issue with SimonK ESCs and large motors(5010). I tested 3 types of ESC, but got no luck. So I decided to use BlHeli flashed ESCs and it works really well now. Some kind of improvement you can have with Simonk at 400hz(RC_Speed Param) instead of 490hz, but thats not 100% proof.
Regards
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