GPS and Dead Cat

Posted by mark on September 16, 2013 at 12:14pm

Hi,

I just started to use Arducopter and had my first successful flights yesterday.  I set up my tgy 9x radio to include loiter, and return to home. Today I am rebuilding this quad to be a deadcat style.

What I am wondering is, is there anything I need to change in the MissionPlaner if I change from quad to deadcat quad?

Also,for some reason the gps seems to be way off now. Not sure how this happened because loiter was basically perfect yesterday. Today it wants to drift way off to the left...so when it does this just throw it back into stableize. Is there something I would need to do to get the gps set correctly? After waiting about 30 sec to a minute after plugging in the batter the ardupilot was blue...so I know it gets gps. It also seem very accruate in the mission planner.

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks to all who make this project what it is: great!!

mark

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Replies

  • mark September 19, 2013 at 8:26am

    I am using arducopter 3.0.1 as a quad. I just changed the P param in the att hold to 0.5 and it made a big difference as far as that goes. Loiter still is all over the place even though I changed that param to 0.5 as well. It sometimes starts out ok... then starts the toilote bowl effect into death if I dont switch back to stabilize mode. Pretty crazy, but I know others are having this same problem. Curious, if I tried to switch it to RTL mode would it go nuts too? The gps seems very accurate (a v2 cirus), even inside it seem to pinpoint where I am.

    Anyway, stabilize and att hold work now for me.

  • mark September 18, 2013 at 10:47am

    Thanks for the responses. I am getting ~ 2.60  on the gpsHDOP. It is strange, it seem quite accurate on the map, but blotchy in the air. *sometimes* it starts out very solid (as far as being still) but almost always starts the toilet bowl effect. At times it gets to the point where it is going to crash, which is when I throw it back into stabalize mode. I have not tried the return to launch (RTL) mode because I am to afraid that if I do it willl take a dive.

    I am also getting a lot of up and down in 'attitude hold' mode. Overall Arducopter kicks butt... I just need to tune it.

    Comments? Thanks in advance.

    IMG_2485.JPG

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  • Developer
    Randy September 16, 2013 at 6:33pm

    Problems with loiter are normally because of compass interference or gps glitches.  There's some information on both these problems on this wiki page.

    The first thing I'd check is the hdop value.  You can display this is nice big easy to read letter in the mission planner's Flight Data screen's "Quick" tab at the bottom.  Just double click on one of the existing numbers and then when it pulls up a big list of checkboxes and fields you need to look for "gpshdop"  First column, 9th field down I think..at least on my machine.  An HDOP of below 2.0 is good...1.5 is very very good.  Above 2 is not good.

    When it comes to the compass interference, running compassmot is probably the most direct way to see what the interference level is but you can also plot the mag-field vs throttle using the mission planner's tlogs.

  • Charles lakins September 16, 2013 at 12:20pm

    You might have to switch to V or H quad to best suit the design

    I know the HT-FPV likes it in V almost stock settings

This reply was deleted.