I built a quadcopter for my high school engineering project, and I am using the Hobby King APM 2.7 master set
It comes with an external gps/mag and the cables to attach it.
When I first ran compass calibration, the offsets very high (hundreds of thousands), and I could not get it to work. I set the offsets to zero and skipped compass in the arming sequence.
I have disabled the internal mag by removing the jumper, but the compass always points around north east. Moving the drone around causes the bearing to track the right direction, but then it centers back on north east.
Looking at the Status screen of the Info View tab,
Never mind, I figured it out. The offsets made during initial calibration were so large that they made the compass's movements insignificant. When I though I had set them to zero, I didn't press write to. I did this time. I guess I'll still post this as a word of warning for compass setup. It had nothing to do with the HK board, just my mistake of calibrating before setting orientation.
If you have extremely high compass offsets (hundreds of thousands), you have your orientation wrong. Set them to zero in Config/Tuning - Full Parameter List - search compass - COMPASS_OFS_X (, Y, Z) then go about finding the correct orientation (which is impossible if you can't read the compass).
Otherwise the compass bearing will be some nearly constant direction, autonomous flight will crash, and you will be very frustrated.
Heres a video of it flying (and some boring footage of the drop mechanism) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddPfd42uePE
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