Hi all, I'm fairly new to Arducopter, but so far I'm amazed at what it can do. I have a small quad running it pretty well, flies great, and I've started experimenting with autonomous flights. It's been a few weeks, and until my last flight, everything has worked perfectly. I'm attaching the log if anyone might be able to verify what I suspect happened.
So I sent the quad on a flight up a river in preparation for doing the same with my Solo. I wouldn't want to loose the little quad, but I really wouldn't want to loose the Solo.
Anyway, the entire flight proceeded perfectly until the quad got within about 1000 feet from it's launch point, where it suddenly started to descend to probably within 20 feet of the ground (the whole flight was a fixed 150 feet altitude above launch), and then just as suddenly, started to climb back towards the last waypoint and then RTL and landed just fine.
When I look at the logs, it looks like it picked up the transmitter signal at the same point it started to descend, lost the signal again around the same point it aborted the descent and continued to the last waypoint.
The log shows Stabilize and Auto modes around that same time. Could it have dropped out of Auto once it regained the signal from the transmitter? As it descended, it dropped below the crest of a hill, which probably blocked the TX signal, at which time it returned to auto?
The way I have my transmitter set up is this: Channel 6 is a 3 position flight mode switch that I have set to Stabilize, Loiter and Drift. Channel 8 is a 2 position switch that enables Auto. So when it regained TX signal, could it have momentarily picked up Channel 6's setting of Stabilize instead of Channel 8's Auto?
If this is the case, is there anything to do to ensure this doesn't happen again? Is it safer to set Auto to one of the modes on the main 3 position flight mode switch? Or perhaps should I switch off my TX once the quad has started it's mission, and only switch it on again when the quad is back within closer range?
Thanks for any light anyone can shine on this issue. Oh, I'm on Arducopter 3.3, just haven't updated to 3.3.1 yet.
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seems to me like you have programmed a FS value for CH8 too, it changes with failsafe.
depending on your RX, try rather one of the best solutions:
1: stop all PPM output after ~250ms of drop.
or
2: Set throttle to FS value (like you did) - but *hold* other channels like ch6+ch8
Thanks for the reply, I think it confirms my suspicion that it was caused by my channel setup.
Here's how I have them set:
Channel 5: (3 position switch) - stabilize, loiter, drift
Channel 6: (3 position switch) - unused
Channel 7: (2 position switch) - RTL
Channel 8: (2 position switch) - Auto
So I'm using 3 different channels to choose between 5 flight modes. I'm thinking upon picking up the transmitter signal on the return, it read channel 5, which was still set to stabilize, before 8, which was set to Auto. It came out of Auto, my throttle was probably low, so it started to descend. Once it got low enough, there were obstructions that caused it to loose the transmitter again, and it seems to have gone back into Auto.
For now, I'll set up my flight modes on one channel and look into how to set others to hold.