Discussions

I have been flying a BIXLER 2 this summer with APM 2.5 , 3DR GPS LEA-6 , 3DR Telemetry , 2.74 software. I have probably had the most fun in all of my 50 years of model flying. I am now auto taking off ( hand launch ) flying 30 waypoints in 12 minutes and auto landing. The flight includes releasing 2 objects (which invariably hit the ground within 10 feet) (SERVO 5)and turning on a landing light ( SERVO 6). I have found a few problems and observations as follows.

1) When adding a waypoint in Mission Planner using ‘add below’, make sure you do not leave the altitude at 0!!

2) Occasionally when executing Mission Planner loiter_turns (n) , the system gets confused and misses the nth turn count and loiters forever at that waypoint without progressing the mission. Not sure of the cause but on the last occasion, the wind was stronger than normal and the loiter radius had inadvertently changed to a lower than normal value.

3) The loiter radius value does seem to change itself in mission planner. I normally set it to 50 feet.

Item 2 has become more critical as I am now trying flying in the dark with LED illumination where I am committed to landing automatically rather than switching to Manual and landing in the dark manually. I have changed the Mission Planner loiter command to loiter _time (75) or possibly will not use loiter.

I have probably had over 100 flights of various lengths. The model has only hit the ground on 2 unplanned occasions. One when I left the altitude at 0 ( see 1 above ) .The other was when it spiraled down during a loiter forever. The Bixler appear to be quite tough!