ArduCopter 3.2.1-rc2 (release candidate #2) has completed beta testing and has been released as the official version available through the mission planner and other ground stations.
Changes from AC3.2 are listed below and in the ReleaseNotes:
1) Enhancements:
a) reduced twitch when passing Spline waypoints
b) Faster disarm after landing in Auto, Land, RTL
c) Pixhawk LED turns green before arming only after GPS HDOP falls below 2.3 (only in flight modes requiring GPS)
2) Safety Features:
a) Add desired descent rate check to reduce chance of false-positive on landing check
b) improved MPU6k health monitoring and re-configuration in case of in-flight failure
c) Rally point distance check reduced to 300m (reduces chance of RTL to far away forgotten Rally point)
d) auto-disarm if vehicle is landed for 15seconds even in Auto, Guided, RTL, Circle
e) fence breach while vehicle is landed causes vehicle to disarm (previously did RTL)
3) Bug Fixes:
a) Check flight mode even when arming from GCS (previously it was possible to arm in RTL mode if arming was initiated from GCS)
b) Send vehicle target destination in RTL, Guided (allows GCS to show where vehicle is flying to in these modes)
c) PosHold wind compensation fix
d) prevent infinite loop with do-jump commands pointing at each other
e) pixhawk memory corruption fix when connecting via USB
f) vehicle stops at fence's alt limit in Loiter, AltHold, PosHold (as it did in AC3.1.5)
g) protect against multiple arming messages from GCS causing gyro calibratoin failure
Thanks to Raph for the video. This is actually a video from AC3.2 until we have one specific to AC3.2.1.
Replies
Okay thanks for that I didn't know that guess it was just doing it's job then!
Hi,
Just crashed my quad with the PixHawk running Arducopter 3.2.1.
I took off in stabilize mode only 0.5 meter high and it went drifting to the left so i corrected it by giving right roll (gently).
Then it drifted to the right at about 10 km/h.
I throttled down immediately, but it kept going until it hit the garden chair.
It didn't react on my TX movements, destroying 3 propellers :-(
I had to pull the battery plug to get it to a stand.
I attached the log so someone please can help me.
In the log you can see by battery issues that I throttled down but "throttle in" went up?
I don't know how to read this.
Thanks in advance,
Paul
edit: calibrated everything before I went flying.
2015-04-03 14-47-05.log
Looking at the log it looks like Land was started because of low battery. Good thing you set that instead of RTL as it looks like it took off from your living room.
Even though Land does not use GPS I think it does to hold itself in place while it is landing. Also in Land mode you have no control over the Throttle so there is no stopping this bird.
There should be a switch that can be flipped that turns failsafe off so that when you are fling in an area that you know you don't want failsafe to kick in it doesn't.
Do to the fact you where so close to the side of your house I think the little GPS drift it had sent the copter way word into the furniture.
I set a timer so that when I get close to the end of the battery I land before any failsafe kicks in as it sometimes leads to a crash.
ThanksMichael. See my post on page 45.
I had situation when drone switched to RTL during landing in Stabilize mode, so it started gain altitude to head home. I was not aware of that fact and thought that drone is trying to fly away, so I flipped mode switch "Stabilize->AltHold->Stabilize", and regained control :) Landed safely and then discovered that there was no reason for concern :)
Might be worth disabling the RTL gain in altitude if the vehicle is closer than 30 feet (even better if it is a user selectable distance) from its return location. Having it climb is a very useful feature but it can cause problems in some situations
1. In high winds (winds speeds are usually lower closer to the ground)
2. Low battery (or a battery that is marginal)
3. Close to home when it just freaks out new users because they have not indication of what is happening.
4. Situations where the near ground airspace is uncluttered.
The gain in altitude is useful for only a couple of scenarios
1. Pilot has descended behind or near obstacles in the flight path home.
2. Pilot has descended into a valley of below the altitude where he/she took off (off a building or bridge).
3. The vehicle was just flown near the ground and there are people wandering in the area and could be in the RTL flight path.
4. Others?
One mechanism that can cover a lot of these situation is to ascend to the maximum height of the flight before returning home. This does have a few bad scenarios (high wind, poor battery) but it is an easy to understand rule that doesn't have the vehicle doing anything that is out of the scope of what it has done during the flight.
Just some food for thought.
I'm writing some code to make one copter follow another copter and got the code to somewhat work.
What I'm disappointed in is that the Mission Item command is not logged on the copter. If someone takes control of the copter you don't see anything as it flies off. Well I suppose the change mode to Guided is a dead give away.
If I specify that RSSI_PIN=103 and RSSI_RANGE=5 and then connect a 1.5 V battery between the ground pins and the sensor pin on the SB slot of the Pixhawk, shouldn't I see an RSSI of 30 in the RC_CHANNELS_RAW message? Right now, I'm seeing a small range of values between 82 to 86 with and without the battery. My Radio is turned off as well. (We were hoping to repurpose the SB slot for a simple sensor we have that will just output a voltage change for demo purposes.)
Rob,
Yes, it should work and display in MP. I followed this article for my receiver and it works fine (with RSSI_RANGE SET AT 3.3V): http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/common-optional-hardware/common-rs...
Display "rssi" as a User Item in MP and see if it shows up there OK.
Thanks for the response. I did get it to work. Here are a couple of things that threw me off:
1.) rssi in the rc_channels_raw message had to be divided by 255 and then multiplied by the rssi_range. I was expecting a number between 0 and 100. The MAVLINK definition indicates that the field will be 0 to 100 and 255 if the value is invalid or unknown:
<field type="uint8_t" name="rssi">Receive signal strength indicator, 0: 0%, 100: 100%, 255: invalid/unknown.</field>
2.) An open circuit won't take the rssi to 0. If the circuit is open, the last rssi value set is cached. Shorting the circuit did bring the rssi to 0.
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