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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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.
Now that the competition's over I may actually try that. I wonder if it will display it on the HUD and read it out loud.
In copter it's possible to disable some of the individual checks that are run when you arm a copter by changing the values in the ARMING_CHECKS parameters but this is quite different from the checks that are causing the bad-compass-health messages that you're seeing. I suspect these are real read failures although it's hard to be sure without a log.
I purchased two ext. mags from ebay for $3 each inc shipping, so the solution need not be expensive
Now that the competition's over, thats what I'm going to do. I have an external compass which I tried to put in until I found out a solder bridge needed to be cut on the board. I didn't want to cut that right before the competition in fear of messing it up and accidentally destroying the board. I ended up just telling the judges that it wouldn't cause a flight failure.
Yes you can disable any of the warnings, this can be done in the extended parameter, I just do not know where to direct you
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