Flying 2.023 Beta in X configuration - yaw issues - Discussions

I've really enjoyed my Arducopter flying NG RC2 since December and decided to take a plunge on the 2.xxx betas. I reconfigured my stock Arducopter into X configuration (APM pointed between arms) and loaded 2.023 Beta yesterday and flew several flights. Magnetometer, gps (1.6), sonar, installed as well as an xbee and had no issues with the configuration using the Mission Planner. (Did all steps including radio calibration, enabling sonar, magnetometer, and autocalibrated my stock ESC's. I enabled both stabilize and simple modes on my gear switch to start with and flew around first flight to auto calibrate the magnetometer in stabilize, but noticed right away drifting of the yaw axis to the right (clock wise) that I can counter with the stick. I thought it might be magnetometer cal issues, so I flew around the back yard trying to hit all headings to a full 360 for about 8 minutes. Sometimes the yaw locked nicely and sometimes after a small yaw to the right, it would just start a slow spin around in a clockwise circle again until I countered with full yaw to the left. I switched battery packs and after checking that the heading looked correct over the telemetry (which it did after the cal), I flew again with pretty much the same twitchiness in the yaw. I also tried simple mode and that works really well for me which confirms to me that the magnetometer is set right and in the right configuration. A little hard to get use to and trust, but it was working very well. In fact I could still cause the copter to spin with a small right yaw command, but it flew around nicely while spinning slowly in a clockwise direction.

I've got 3 logs from my 3 flights yesterday that I'm looking at now to understand what the software is doing (for a learning experience) as well as some static bench tests to understand what the log data is. Anyway, the Arducopter flys great in simple mode which I really like - is nice and stable otherwise, but just a little twitchy in yaw and requires some finesse to keep it stable in rotation. I'm flying a Futaba 12FGH radio with the 12 channel receiver and I'm wondering if the center position of the yaw channel (rudder) may not be exactly centered at 1.500 msecs. Anyway - since there is talk of a release soon, I wanted to give my experience with the latest.

Thanks to the team for all the hard work on the software development and I'm having a blast and learning a bunch.

Heino

Replies

Developer

Jason Short June 4, 2011 at 9:32pm

If you can post a log and point out exactly where the Yaw issue happened I would really appreciate it.

Jason
3D Robotics

Chris Anderson June 4, 2011 at 3:44pm

Thanks for the helpful test report. Some users are reporting similar yaw action. Although we don't see it on our own quads, it does seem to crop up with certain radio/airframe combination. Jason is looking into this, so look for an update to yaw in the next rev.

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