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I can't even arm the motors!

Posted by Owen Booth on April 18, 2011 at 3:58am

Hey all. I'm a bit of a newbie at this game, having only played with glow fuel fixed wing RC's many years ago. All this electric stuff is doing my head in!

I purchased the ready soldered, and coded version of the Arducopter, and spent four hours putting it all together from all the pieces of conflicting instructions for different revisions all over the place. I failed to get Configurator tool to connect, but managed to run all the commands through the CLI  steps successfully, and uploaded the Arducopter RC2 software.

Question is, when turn the quad on again, it does the usual beeps etc, but there is no throttle response.

In Mode 2, holding the throttle (left stick) down and to the right for several seconds does not arm the motors.

The A led shows solid green.I tested the TX/RX with servos, and it's all doing what it's meant to.

Any help would be much appreciated!

best regards,

Owen

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Replies

  • Michael Brown April 20, 2011 at 6:37pm
    I'm kinda new at this also but I found that to get the motors to arm I had to move the throttle trim down all the way. I calibrated the radio with the trim in the middle and I could not get the motors to arm. I moved the trim down all the way and everything worked fine. I am using a DX8 radio with the 8 ch receiver. I hope I could help. Now I need to figure out how to get the rudder to work. Good luck.
  • Al Cutter April 19, 2011 at 12:34am

    I'm sorry that I don't have an answer for you, but so you know you're not alone I do have a similar problem: rx/tx are bound and most stuff seems to be working as I can run each motor separately using the four tx sticks in the motor test mode in CLI, but I can't arm the motors in flying (non-CLI) mode, enabling the radio logging and dumping the logs after a failed attempt seems to suggest that *only* the throttle channel is making it through to the PWM input (unless the other channels just aren't logged when it's not armed ? haven't checked the code yet), that would certainly explain why I can't arm the motors.

     

    The motor test seems to indicate that all channels are capable of being sampled correctly by the APM inputs, and I uploaded the radio test sketch from the ArducopterMega project and indeed that confirms that everything is working fine.

     

    Sounds very much like we might both be running in to the same issue.

     

    Cheers,

    Al.

  • Matthew Gray April 18, 2011 at 5:22pm
    Im also having this problem. When I put the slider switch on the apm board towards the front it doesn't connect. When i put it towards the back it will connect but nothing else will work. Does this happen to you too?
  • Ante Vukorepa April 18, 2011 at 4:13am
    Would be much simpler to debug with Configurator.

    You wrote it fails to connect...
    Stupid question, but, have you changed the Configurator connection timeout to 30s?
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