A couple months ago I bought the ArduPilot Mega kit and am excited to get it up and running. I've been working to get it running with xplane before I strap it to my plane (crashing in xplane is better than crashing in real life). Unfortunately I have been having trouble getting stable flight our of my APM when running in any modes other than manual flight. Does someone have a known good PID configuration so I can begin troubleshooting?
My setup consists of xplane running on my mac with Mission Planner running in a Windows virtual machine. Most recently I tested with APM 2.22 and Mission Planner 1.0.54. Like I said, my flight in manual mode is pretty responsive so I feel like my overall configuration (radio, APM, xplane, Mission Planner) is setup correctly. I started the process of tuning the PID settings but the behavior is pretty eratic and unpredictable. By that I mean the plane control surfaces pitch and roll follow an eratic behavior.
A known good configuration file would help rule out the PID settings. Any tips would be much appreciated. Thanks,
Scott
Replies
hey hows it going, I too am having this problem down to the t. the weird thing is that I had it working a couple of days ago and then when i connected everything up again this problem started happening and i now have tried it on two different computers both running win7pro. some things you should know is that im not using the mega, just the ardupilot, and i have been using the reverse controls already. i will try looking into xplane again and see if there is anything in there about reverse controls and i will post again later. i really appreciate the help.
-dan
Ok. Try try again. I've got X-Plane v9.7 (DVD) Mission Planner version 1.0.62 and APM 2.23 HIL firmware loaded. Clicked connect, APM Setup, reset APM to default, Radio Input -> Calibrate Radio -> save, Modes -> Save Modes.
Yeah, same story.
So..... I was reading in some of the other messages and found out that there were people that had to set reverse pitch and roll in the simulator view. I tried setting those. In X-Plane it was all reversed. You ever try to fly manual when the controls are backwards? So I changed them back. Took off in manual control. Made sure I had plenty altitude, then clicked the changes and flipped the switch for auto mode. And what do you know? Worked great!
So, question I have now is the following: How do I configure the Mission Planner to allow for regular manual mode, and flipped auto mode?
I was playing a bit with HIL the other night and I'll comment that although the default PID values are good enough to get you going, they are not really very good. I know I changed the airspeed to pitch P gain by more than a factor of 5 to get it in the neighborhood of where I'd consider it well tuned.
If someone can find and lend me an extra 4 hours, I'd be happy to go through the PID tuning using Xplane and make up some videos on how to do it. As it is, I'd have to steal that time from sleep, and I'm a bit short on that.
Interesting... I too have a similar issue/problem. Although my setup is different. I have Mission Planner and X-Plane running on the same machine (microsoft 7). I CAN fly in manual mode. It is VERY sensitive, although flyable. When I change modes to stabilize (or any of the other auto modes), the plane banks very hard until inverted and rocks back and forth. It pitches violently until I switch back into manual mode and recover. I'm using the GP_PT_60 with default PID's.
Interestingly enough it appears to work great when I upload non X-Plane code. I hooked up servos and rocked the IMU board and the servos appeared to try to stabilize.
I've tried all sort of configurations, but have yet to have anything but violent pitching and rolling in auto mode.