I'm about to finish my first Arducoper! :) But, I'm having trouble getting the ESC's to calibrate properly. I'm using a 9x (stock at the moment) and it seems to be all good.
I get the beeps at intervals with the ESC control disconnected and I get the start up melody when they are connected and then they go silent.
I think it might be my radio calibration. I've gone threw the wiki and that's what I come up with. The one thing I don't understand is the 100% asked for before doing the all at once calibration.
My radio doesn't push the full scale 100% top to bottom but it does a good portion of the scale. Is this my problem you think? Or is it something else? It's a bone stock APM 1
Also I noticed with the GPS pluged in it seems to brown out the APM? So I've just left that unpluged for now. I figure I'll figure that out after I cal the ESC's
Monroe
Replies
Don, a little off topic, but you set the Aux channels under "AUX-CH". That's the last item on the last page of the setup.
Assign one of the "trim" pots to the mode switch, under CH5.
Are you using the stock (yellow) ESCs that come in an Arducopter kit? I used those and was unable to get them to calibrate either automatically or individually. It turns out that some of the ESCs shipped by 3DRobotics have a firmware that doesn't allow them to be calibrated, even though the paper instructions that come with them suggests that they are calibratable (if that's a word). I wrote to the nice folks at the DIYDrones store and they shipped me a set with updated firmware (after I returned the old ones.)
The issue of your radio not being at 100% wouldn't matter unless you'd set a "custom curve" to decrease the radio's scale. I'm guessing your stock 9x is not the issue.
BTW, this problem made me crazy for a week until I found mention of someone else with this situation on another part of the DIYDrones forum. The best part of working on an arducopter is the community of people who help figure out your issues...
The APM auto-calibration doesn't always work. But if you use that, it shouldn't depend on your radio or its calibration, since the software sends the calibrations sequence using the APM pwm generator. Suggest you do individual calibration of each esc using your radio.