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Copter-3.3 beta testing

Posted by Randy on April 11, 2015 at 8:15pm

Warning #1: an issue has been found with Tower's Pause button which can cause the vehicle to fly to an old position if the vehicle has not sent a position update to Tower in some time.

Warning #2: Copter-3.3.2 fixes a bug found in Copter-3.3.1's desired climb rate initialisation which could lead to a sudden momentary drop when switching from Stabilize or Acro to AltHold, Loiter or PosHold.

Warning #3: Copter-3.3.2 fixes an issue found in Copter-3.3.1 which could lead to hard landings in RTL or AUTO if the WPNAV_SPEED_DN was set too high (i.e. >400 or 4m/s) and/or the WPNAV_ACCEL_Z was set too low (i.e. <100 or 1m/s/s).

Warning #4: a bug was found in Copter-3.3 which could cause a sudden crash if you abort a Take-off initiated from a ground station.  Video description is here.  The bug is fixed in Copter-3.3.1 so we recommend upgrading.

Note #1: AC3.3-rc8 corrected a long standing bug in the HDOP reporting.  HDOP values will appear about 40% lower than previously but this does not actually mean the GPS position is better than before.
Note #2: if upgrading from AC3.2.1 the vehicle's accelerometer calibration needs to be done again.
Note #3: set SERIAL2_PROTOCOL to "3" and reboot the board to enable FrSky telemetry like in previous versions.
Note #4: the wiki will be updated over the next few weeks to explain how to use the new features

Copter-3.3.1 is available through the mission planner.  The full list of changes vs AC3.2.1 can be see in the ReleaseNotes and below are the most recent changes since AC3.3.

Sadly this version (and all future versions) will not run on the APM2.x boards due to CPU speed, flash and RAM restrictions.

Changes from 3.3:

1) Bug fix to prevent potential crash if Follow-Me is used after an aborted takeoff

2) compiler upgraded to 4.9.3 (runs slightly faster than 4.7.2 which was used previously)

Changes from 3.3-rc11:

1) EKF recovers from pre-arm "Compass variance" failure if compasses are consistent

Changes from 3.3-rc10:

1) PreArm "Need 3D Fix" message replaced with detailed reason from EKF

Changes from 3.3-rc9
1) EKF improvements:
    a) simpler optical flow takeoff check
2) Bug Fixes/Minor enhancements:
    a) fix INS3_USE parameter eeprom location
    b) fix SToRM32 serial protocol driver to work with recent versions
    c) increase motor pwm->thrust conversion (aka MOT_THST_EXPO) to 0.65 (was 0.50)
    d) Firmware version sent to GCS in AUTOPILOT_VERSION message
3) Safety:
    a) pre-arm check of compass variance if arming in Loiter, PosHold, Guided
    b) always check GPS before arming in Loiter (previously could be disabled if ARMING_CHECK=0)
    c) sanity check locations received from GCS for follow-me, do-set-home, do-set-ROI
    d) fix optical flow failsafe (was not always triggering LAND when optical flow failed)
    e) failsafe RTL vs LAND decision based on hardcoded 5m from home check (previously used WPNAV_RADIUS parameter)

Thanks for your testing!

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Tags: 33, apm:copter, arducopter, beta, testing
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Replies

    • Randy Bachtell > Randy November 22, 2015 at 4:54am
      Loaded up 3.3.2.1 on two of my birds and put them through every possible combination of maneuvers switching between modes at random, I became confused but the aircraft handled everything in stride, even with fairly heavy winds. Landing modes spot on, Nav control looks great.

      Thanks for the hard work,
      RB
    • _maxgr > Randy November 22, 2015 at 3:32am
      Hi randy! I got a big problem :-( with 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 rc2 the copter takes off in loiter/althold with about 80% of throttle given by me. In stabilize it takes off with about 45% of throttle. What can that cause and how can i fit it? In the logs i saw that the thrOut is much lower than the thrIn when trying to fly in loiter/althold...
      • Developer
        Randy > _maxgr November 22, 2015 at 5:34pm

        Yup, I agree wit Nathaniel.  Just one thing.. taking off and landing in AltHold, Loiter or PosHold should work a-ok.  I take-off and land in these modes all the time.  If it doesn't work, I'm happy to have a peek at a dataflash log file.

    • Ivan R > Randy November 21, 2015 at 3:07pm

      2) Fix to hard landings when WPNAV_SPEED_DN set high in RTL, Auto (resolved by using non-feedforward alt hold)

      ^^^ nice to see this one, i had a few hard landings myself because of it, and broken gear legs...will try first thing tomorrow!

    • Wilson Thong > Randy November 21, 2015 at 8:36am

      Today tested AC3.3.2-rc2 on my quad-copter. It has a Lidar-v2 and px4flow.

      In AC3.3.1, I was unable to arm in AltHold when FLOW_ENABLE = 1. It happened the GPS reception is also bad (so bad it couldn't pass the 3D-fix pre-arm check if I armed it in PosHold mode). Now with AC3.3.2-rc2 I can arm in the same situation.

      However I crash the Tower-v3.2.0! Whenever I attempt to change the EKF_GPS_TYPE from 0 to 3, the Tower-v3.2.0 crashes. So I haven't test optical-flow-loiter in this flight. 

      I use Mission planner (1.3.32.12 build 1.1.5803.19723) to review the dataflash log. I see several funny error codes:

      Err: 195-203

      Err: 193-0

      Err: 255-11

      What are they?

      3702604346?profile=original

      I fly AC3.3.2-rc2 in stabilize, altHold with Lidar-v2, and posHold. Overall very happy with it. The altHold now is very *solid* when I land it. No jumpy altitude anymore when my copter is very close to ground (less than 1 meter). Thanks to the range-finder feature!

      an unrelated question. I bought a USB-fpv-video-receiver from CUAV. It can receive video signal on 5.8GHz and stream video to smartphone/PC via USB. Can Tower display the video coming from USB?

      Thank you very much for the great work!! 

      • Developer
        Randy > Wilson Thong November 30, 2015 at 2:28am

        Wilson,

        Thanks for testing and sorry for the slow reply.

        I have no idea what those error messages that you've seen are.  Our highest error message is 20 so I'm unsure where 195 has come from although my guess is it's caused by some corruption in the log or a display issue in the MP.  If you have the log still I can take a peek.

        We've got a new discussion re optical flow which you've probably already found but here it is in any case.

        Feel free to report that Tower issue here.  Maybe it's crashing if it gets a message it doesn't understand although really it should have protection against that kind of problem.

        If the video from the USB-fpv system is H264 then it should be possible to get it displaying in Tower but maybe pinging the Tower guys through their community page is the way to try and get that working.  I googled for the USB fpv system from CUAV but couldn't immediately find it.  If you have a link I'm a bit interested in checking it out.

    • Cala > Randy November 21, 2015 at 4:47am

      Many thank's Randy, load and try to test this weekend

  • Andy Piper November 20, 2015 at 5:37am

    Hi Leonard,

    An update on this. I have done some manual tuning on Roll using the Dave C method. The results are ok but I note a couple of things:

    Roll_P needs to be quite high for good response, its much too soggy otherwise

    Roll_I set to the same level results in unflyable oscillations.

    So I conclude that autotune will never be able to tune this copter if it sets Roll_P == Roll_I.

    Roll still feels less responsive than pitch. Not sure how I can improve this. I'm also going to try go back to simon K to see what different that makes (but with active braking enabled).

    Thoughts?

    QAV-Tune.jpg

    2015-11-20 13-10-14.bin

    • Andy Piper > Andy Piper November 21, 2015 at 4:39am

      I've drastically improved roll responsiveness by upping ATC_ACCEL_R_MAX. Autotune had set this to a very low value (53000), I increased it to 180000 and now the copter feels much, much more responsive.

      So the $1m question is if I now try autotune on this - which actually feels pretty good - will it make it better or worse?

      Too much wind at the moment to try it out!

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