Hi everyone, thanks in advance for reading my note here. I did do my best to read all the docs but could not find exactly what I was looking for - am hoping you much more experienced drone fliers could help a noob here...
I bought my excellent hexacopter from USR just over a week ago and have gotten the various additional parts (radio, batteries) together to fly it. Today I finished my ESC calibration and, being a coder, habitually updated to the most recent firmware (eg 2.8.1 to 2.9.1...). Hm. I then realized this involves some uh, recalibration, and did my best on that. Carefully calibrated the accelerometer as in the ArduCopter 2.9.1 instructions on this forum. And redid it a couple times to be sure... but I don't think that's it. Have not yet added vibration dampening, since I just got the USR drone and need to get more parts to make room for foam (could the lack of foam be leading to my symptoms below..?) I checked my PID values in the ArduCopter Config - they were as shown in the 2.9.1 instructions.
So when I carefully throttle up - as soon as the hexacopter lifts off it goes into a mad spin - either to the left or to the right. The yaw control does seem to have some effect - I can make it spin right or left. And it seems like it wants to start spinning faster and faster before I throttle down.
I was thinking to try to tweak the stabilize yaw value - but not sure what value to try and also, seems like the problem could be larger than this..?
Or am I missing something on resetting the gyros before flight ..? or ..?
I'd greatly appreciate any thoughts you might have on this... thanks again for your help and I hope to someday repay the favor.
Quinn
Replies
Thanks for the help everyone. I send the drone back to 3DRobotics for a fix which appears to be ESC or soldering related. They agreed that that seems to be the issue.
I appreciate the help and hope to return it someday!
Quinn
After seeing the video I am suspicious that you have a single motor or ESC that is behaving badly. The lack of lift on one side combined with the spinning motion is an indication that a single rotor is turning too slowly. Try this: For each motor on the side of the hex that is not lifting pull the 3 wire plug from the ESC that goes to the PDB and plug it into a separate radio receiver. Power that motor individually at 40% throttle. Do this with 3 motors on that side of the hex. See if one is behaving different than the other two.
Here's a video of what this looks like if you try to lift off (and yes - calibrated the radio. Throttle works great, I haven't reversed my yaw...). My next steps are an "erase" command and a recalibration of magentometer and accelerometer...
Anyone else have any ideas on what is going on here?
spinspinhexa.m4v
I tried recalibrating the ESC's - same behavior. Strange thing is the compass points accurately when I am on USB or on telemetry - I can move the device all over, no problem, compass is accurate, as are other accelerometer axes. And zeros out accurately.
Radio sticks are all calibrated and centering accurately.
Hope someone can help. Totally stuck over here. Thanks.
Hi,
Please post a picture of your hexa so we can see the props. Thanks!
This is goofy, but are you sure you installed the hexa firmware?
If anyone could even point me in the right direction here I would be quite grateful... I'm at a loss and would love to get this copter in the air... thank you!