I'm currently running a APM 2.5+ board on a skywalker 1880. Due to tightly packed electronics, occasionally the compass will give out bad reading and the "BAD Compass Health" warning will show on mission planner's HUD. Despite the error, the plane still flies perfectly. The problem is it will be in a competition soon, and I don't want the message showing up during flight with judges watching. Does anyone know if it's possible to disable that warning?
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sory, just want to know, what your magfield before u mounted your ex.gps? my magfield now is 306, what should the value of magfield be?
Bill,
great news.
The heading change when the board is rotated is coming from the gyros. We mix the two signals, so very short-term updates come from the gyros but long-term it comes from the compass.
These are not a real issue. It's a false positive during the start-up of the board before the gyros are initialised and become healthy. In AC3.2 we delay the reporting of the gyro health until after they've initialised so this message doesn't appear. AC3.2 will be out soon but if you can't wait, maybe raising an issue on the Mission Planner's issue list to ask for the messages to be suppressed for 10 seconds after connecting to the board.
Those are only checks specifically for Arming, they will not disable the "Bad Compass Health" warning
"These warnings about a critical control system not working properly are very annoying. Can't I just turn them off??"
:/
Are you using compass_learn?
The main way to prevent it is to try route all main power leads away from the board with the compass on, but that's not always possible especially in a tightly packed space which for many of us is unavoidable. However one of our APM equipped planes' flies perfectly well with the compass disabled completely and I would go out on a limb to say that planes probably don't actually need a compass.
I'm not aware of any way to disable the bad compass health warning though.
Graham,
I think that would cause problems with the initial heading though unless you were careful to plug it in while it's facing north. Even if you didn't do this, the heading would likely be corrected once the vehicle was moving (I'm not sure how long the correction would take) but I'm pretty sure it would fly in the wrong direction for some period of time.
The plane that we're using without the compass enabled does perfect auto-launches every single time. It holds it's initial and latter direction better than some of our other planes which use compass and EKF with a Pixhawk. These sometimes seem to have a gentle arc during auto-launches whereas the non-compass plane always goes straight.
Thanks for all the replies, this year I had to just tell the judges that is wasn't a major concern. Now that the competition's over I'm going to buy an external compass.
1) Go into code.
2) Search for "Bad Compass Health".
3) Replace with "I'm not dead yet".
4) Recompile.
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