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
Ciao - Giuseppe
Is APM2 still going to be supported with 3.2?
Barrett,
Yes, AC3.2 will likely be the last major release for the APM1/APM2.x boards. There may be minor patch releases afterwards but nothing big. Unless of course some developer shows up that really wants to independently continue development for the APM2.x platform. It's open source so that's totally cool. The main focus of development is going to be on the higher performance CPUs boards which are quickly becoming the standard.
Randy,
I/We all request to re strore back pos hold mode for 3.2
Please.
Thanks,
Hey Randy, is there a tag/branch string for downloading code related to ArduCopter3.1.4 release? I've tried the following ArduCopter-3.1.4 , ArduCopter-3.1.4rc1, but no joy.
thanks
Matthew,
You should be able to grab the code out of the ArduCopter-3.1 branch in github. I assume you want to compile for the APM1/2.x boards? If you want to compile for the PX4/Pixhawk it's a little more complicated as you need to use the ArduCopter-3.1.2 branch for the ardupilot and PX4Firmware repositories. The branch names are a bit confusing. In hindsight we should have named them ArduCopter-3.1-apm and ArduCopter-3.1-px4.
Randy, in my case it is the Pixhawk I am looking to compile for as I guess these changes are meant for the pixhawk? OK, so basically the 3.1.2 branch latest will contain the 3.1.4 release. So the following commands should work
git clone git://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot.git -b ArduCopter-3.1.2
And for PX4Firmware:
git clone --branch ArduCopter-3.1.2 https://github.com/diydrones/PX4Firmware
?
Randy,is number 2 connected with problem described here?
http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/pixhawk-connection-problem
Emin,
I'm not sure. It's possible. I had only heard of it affecting the log files not anything that would cause the Pixhawk not to boot.
pixhawx does boot but is not possible to arm with safty button....after erasing logs from SD card it is all ok..
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