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
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!
Where do you retrieve the logs from in 3.2? Apparently it doesn't use the CLI as of this release.
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.
Thanks Randy. Along those same lines, where do I set my log preferences? I need to enable IMU.
Randy, Is a new thread going to be created for 3.2? Isnt it a nice idea as info are already coming to here regarding that version?
Joao,
Thanks for the reminder. Added here!
is there a hybrid flight mode finally included? if so is it called hybrid or another name?
i think its just a beta and not an official release yet?
@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.
Hi,
If i'm updating firmware in APM do i have to do all the calibration again (ACC, gyro, compass, setup PID etc)?
-
26
-
27
-
28
-
29
-
30
of 106 Next