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
Luis,
The ReleaseNotes.txt files has most of the improvements. It's a big list and although I try to make the point understandable there's a lot of changes and getting your head around everything is a challenge. Still, better than trolling through GitHub I suspect!
My point
this LAND_SPEED issue was implemented Dec2012 on fw 2.9, and I couldn't find more references to it.
Your excelent explanation above should be there :) or somewhere else TBD.
but short of sending everybody to github, I believe that a more "consumer" friendly status location would be beneficial.
Also, and please don't get me wrong, most of the improvements is not acceptable. What, IMHO, is needed is all of the corrections and improvements. That's why I try to follow the commits......
What is your RTL final altitude or something like that...
No need to upgrade parameters. They should remain as they are. New discussion for AC3.2-rc1 is here.
It is. Look at beta section. Just been out flying 3.2 RC1
it s not out of beta it s the reason why there are not topic about it for the moment
Yes, of course it is the beta. Just been out flying my tricopter and it is a pleasure. Tried stab, alt hold, loiter, RTL and auto missions. Can`t really tell much different on stab, alt hold and loiter because they worked very well already. But RTL and auto was totally different. I have always had these sudden stops on RTL and when waypoints was reached. Now the transitions is smooth and nice. It slowly turn it self to the next waypoint and continues. I am really looking forward to test all the other functions also. It seems that you again have made something fabolous even better. Unbelievable! Congratulation!
Barrett,
They can be downloaded via Mavlink now. So the mission planner's flight data screen has a "dataflash" tab on the bottom left. Similarly if someone wants to do a parameter reset that's available from the full params list. And the motors test can be done from the Initial Setup > Optional Hardware > Motor Test screen. There might be some better places for some of these features..that's a UI question for MichaelO of course.
Joao,
Thanks for the reminder. Added here!
@randy, i set the wpnav_rad to a figure above 0m (4m) in this case. The problem of not executing the command following the 'Takeoff' command has been resolved and also the landing problem after RTL is related to this. those who are not able to land at the end of RTL while using RTL command might be having the wpnav_rad set to 0 which defaults sometimes while planning mission. so three issues have been resolved by keeping the wpnav_rad within limits. fault was mine, i should have tried that earlier.
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