Yesterday I fired up the motors for the first time on my new PX4-powered quad (firmware v2.9.1b). Going through the initial setup and calibration everything seemed fine, except that I could not perform an accelerometer calibration and I could only arm by clicking the Mission Planner button. Every time I tried an accel calibration the system would hang until I reset power, so I decided to shelf it for the night and try again later.
Today I decided to send the aircraft up for its maiden flight without the accel calibration, since the aircraft level was *kinda* close to where it should be and I was eager to try it out. Things were not working as planned from the first time I plugged the battery in this morning.
Symptoms (today):
1. PX4 Safety Button LED was solid, and flashed steady when pressed, no "heartbeat" flash.
2. No data was being sent from 3DR Radio (red led not flashing).
3. No data was being sent from uBlox GPS (TX led not flashing).
4. Mission Planner would not connect via radio nor by USB, but COM port still showed for USB.
5. Firmware re-upload attempts would hang at "connecting...".
6. Computer would say SD Card from FMU was not formatted.
Symptoms (yesterday):
7. Accelerometer calibration would hang.
8. Arming could only be done through Mission Planner, and not R/C transmitter
Replacing the SD Card with one from my camera solved the problem. I'm not sure at this point if I did something improper to damage the card or if it is just faulty. I also loaded firmware v3.0rc5 while I was at it.
UPDATE: Everything still seems to be working fine, with one exception: Just once when I plugged the battery in the PX4 Safety button stayed solid, the accel calibration was way out of whack, and would hang when I tried to calibrate. Thankfully the problem went away when I re-connected the battery and hasn't occurred again.
Replies
Cody,
Your project looks great. I have a similar setup to you and I'm stuck at trying to get the esc's armed. Can you tell me how you setup your Turnigy remote to communicate correctly with the PX4. I have calibrated all sensors and calibrated the remote. I can connect to qgroundcontrol and see the throttle moving in the rc config tab but nothing happens when I try to arm the esc's by moving the throttle to the lower left. Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Dustin
So I'm not convinced the SD Card was the culprit. The whole system seems to be plagued by gremlins, and the symptoms are different every time I plug in the battery. Separately, it experienced GPS failure, 3DR radio failure, ppm encoder failure, multiple i/o board failures (similar to described above). Sometimes when I apply power everything works great, and so far my only way of dealing with the problems is to re-connect power until everything works. I'm thinking it has to be some king of power/initialization issue, but I'm not sure how to proceed.
I'm using a PX4 w/ I/O board which powers a uBlox GPS, 3DR radio, ppm encoder, Turnigy 9x receiver, and four Turnigy Multistar opto ESCs from a 4s LiPO.