Hi all enthusiasts
I must say that I am very happy and impressed with the supplied kit and am having fun assembling it.
Well done to the all the guys involved in the evolution of the hardware and software, I think in the months to come we will see a quantum leap in the reliability and functionality of the code.
I have read lots of forum stuff for months before I finally got an ArduCopter kit which I am still building.
I am still a bit bemused as to what software/firmware I should be running when I finally get to the stage of flying.
The hardware assembly side of things seems to be pretty well documented but what I am finding difficult is finding a sequence of setting up the ArduCopter software/firmware from start to finish.
I know you store the NG code in eeprom, then I guess you use the CLI to fine tune the parameters in this code.
If the base NG code changes, do you have to start from the beginning and re-calibrate etc?
Has there been anything posted previously that describes this sequence?
It would be great to find a step by step document describing the programming sequence and what software does what to what in the firmware and how to save a backup of what is installed!
Replies
There's some decent instructions on the wiki for "Loading the code". You can find it here.
Re whether you need to recalibrate if the NG code changes...in general 'no' but occasionally 'yes'. It depends upon how severe the code change is. If you were moving from RC1 to RC2 then definitely you would need to re-do the calibration but if you're picking up minor changes directly from subversion (i.e. not official releases) then it's unlikely unless someone has very recently added some big new feature that perhaps requires saving new config to the EEPROM.
Recalibration is not actually that painful though. it's 10~15 minutes work once you've done it a couple of times.