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
Rainer,
That's weird but you're right, I can also see that it's disappeared. I've ping'd a note to Michael O. It's not because of any change in ArduCopter.
AC3.1.2 is now available through the mission planner.
There are no changes for the APM2 but the APM2 will pick up these changes when AC3.2 goes out.
For the Pixhawk, there are the following few changes from AC3.1.1:
1) GPS Glitch detection disabled when connected via USB
2) RC_FEEL_RP param added for adjusting responsiveness to pilot roll/pitch input in Stabilize, Drift, AltHold modes
3) Pixhawk baro bug fix to SPI communication which could cause large altitude estimate jumps at high temperatures
Hopefully there will be no problems but please report back if you see anything!
Thanks again to those who tested the release candidates!
Hi Randy, thanks for all the work you and the other developers have put into AC.
I spent the last few days battling a pendulum like effect on an F1000-M8 Octa in Loiter on APM 2.5.2 with AC 3.1.1, had real bad pendulum effect and if hit by a gust of wind it built up an oscillating pendulum that gradually got worse, put it down to APM 2.5 running out of CPU power until I flew a small quad spider with 3.1.1 late today and saw the same pendulum effect not as bad as on the octa but there nevertheless, I loaded 3.1 on the Quad and the pendulum effect is gone in Loiter, I then loaded 3.1 on the Octa and its Pendulum effect also went away. By the way on the Octa I was testing 3 different motors on 4s and 6s with different size props and the pendulum effect was always there, dialing Loiter PID down only made it less active but did not fix it, landing in Loiter was a struggle as it got near the ground in dirty air it was nearly out of control. My Acc x,y,z values are very low on both the Octa and the Quad, it was not vibrations causing it.
Hi Joe... I too have the pendulum effect ... it seems to be with the heavy camera and gimbal hanging under the Hex T810... this was noticed after auto tune .. and as I try to move slowly fwd in loiter ... it starts to swing and it gets worse until switch back to Alt hold .. reducing Loiter PID helped but seems to be not the best fix ..I noticed this about two weeks ago ...
Hi Reuben, I did not have anything heavy attached to the F1000-M8 as I was initially trying 3 different motor sets with various prop combinations. In hindsight I am now aware that I had the same issue when using 3.1.1 in loiter on an RCT800 Hex, a Spider Quad and the large F1000-M8 Octa, none of which had anything heavy underneath - no gimbal or anything like that.
Naturally now that I know I need to compare logs between 3.1 and 3.1.1 the weather is no wind with rain forecast for the next 4 days.
Randy, which items in Logs should I enable to allow devs to nail whatever is causing this ? as soon as it stops raining I can do some flights and log those parameters.
I my experience this Pendulum effect on my quad in AC3.1.2-rc2. I just hope they'll find a solution on their next fw release.
Well, I'm relieved to hear you're still seeing the issue in AC3.1.1. We haven't touched Loiter since AC3.0.1 so I'd be worried that we'd broken something accidentally although we do a lot of testing between versions so it would be surprising if it were a firmware issue I think.
It's most likely tuning. I'd guess comparing the ATT message's Roll-In vs Roll and Pitch-In vs Pitch will show that the frame is not keeping up with the attitude requests from the pilot or navigation controller.
I see a pendulum effect on my 3dr quad when I have the rate roll/pitch P values too low.
By the way, the full list of changes between AC3.1 and AC3.1.1 can be seen here. It's possible that something has been broken between the two but to me it seems unlikely because of the very few items actually changed.
Randy, severe vibrations can actually cause really bad loiter too. Probably not news to you, but something else for people to look at. When I had that helicopter with a frame problem, the loiter was all over the places. It was also kinda like a pendulum as the INAV position estimate bounced around between the GPS position, and the inertial estimate.
I tested 3.1.1 Loiter last night on a Pixhawk quad. Seemed fine to me. But I would need to test it on an APM to be sure.
Thanks Randy, will do some further testing when it stops raining.
I am talking about a wobbly Loiter that holds position but pitches and rolls randomly not smooth straight and level as it should be and is with 3.1
With 3.1.1 If a gust of wind hits the hex or octa it pitches and rolls and yaws very unlike what it does in 3.1, on the octa it looks bad enough to think it is out of control as the pendulum builds up to quite steep angles if you leave it alone, not pleasant watching a heavy 5 KG octa nearly out of control.
By the way the octa hovers at 51.6 % in case anyone thinks it is over or under powered, using 4S HP4215-630KV with 12x4.5 CF props. AV Dome delivers Accelerometer x,y,z graphs to die for.
-
85
-
86
-
87
-
88
-
89
of 106 Next