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
Hello guys,
we have 5 new multirotors (X4 and X8s) in out field with APM2.5 / 2.6 with V3.01 - V3.11 all exhibiting the same problem.
in LOITER mode, when you fly and release the sticks the quad stop in the point for a very short time (less than 1 second) and then continues to drift in the same flight direction it had before for X more meters coming to a stop X meters from the point the stck was released.
with older versions the quad used to stop still at the spot when i released the stick.
can you advise how to change this please? we get exactly the same with all 5 machines.
thanks.
Can anyone advise please?
I have the same problem- The quad stops after 10 meters.
Randy-Please advise here.
Other than this- the V3.11 is just great!!!!!!
Thanks
I want to try out taking off while in loiter mode. Is there a preset altitude it will launch up to or is this simply determined by how far the throttle is set at? Also on the APM1 on board compass I am getting a magfield reading about 385. Is this regarded as acceptable?
John,
385 is ok. It's really more about how much the length changes when the throttle is increased. It's resting length (with motors off) is mostly determined by your physical location. So move to south america and it will be about 1/2 as strong.
Loiter will "launch" to 20cm when you take-off :-). so basically it'll just start climbing as you raise the throttle.
Thanks Randy. I just did a test flight in the back yard and I am worried to try and enter any of the flight modes because it seems the GPS is wandering around a lot. Its an APM1 with MediaTek gps and it never seems to get more than 3 sats. Im at my families place in Aus but in Malaysia when I built this copter I use to have many more sats. Though can imagine its location related because I usually get more sats on my other gps's in Aus than Malaysia. Attached is a tlog for the test I just did this morning. Thanks for any advice. John
2014-02-14 08-53-12.tlog
John,
No promises if you're using the Mediatek I'm afraid. Australia has notoriously bad GPS quality. A double whammy!
Rainer,
ROI should be disappearing but DO_SET_ROI should still be there. ROI is not the correct command to use for arducopter in any case...it's always DO_SET_ROI.
that is correct.
the commanding DO_SET_ROI no longer exists in the Mission Planner.
greeting
Rainer
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