I thought I'd share the following video with you. After spending several months trying to replicate the rock solid loiter videos, I've finally suceeded - and the only thing that I needed to do (other than vibration dampening) was to raise the GPS several inches above the top plate and keep the wires away from interference sources. The HDOP has dropped from 1.9-5 to 1.3-1.6.
Additionally, I've add LED strips to the arms which are controlled by the ArduCopter board using some custom code. When armed it oscillates around like shown. When disarmed, the arms flash when a GPS lock is absent, and are solid when there is a GPS lock. Giving a clear indication when its safe to fly.
You can find the code for my leds.pde file at:
It's fairly easy to modify, the update_copter_leds() function gets called at regular intervals, you just have to decide what to do - in my case I check the armed status and GPS state.
Comments
Thanks for the info Randy. That'd be quite a useful tool - it might also be useful to collect data on GPS 'glitches' and see what filter might eliminate the sudden fly aways.
Best
Gareth
Nice work.Keep it up.
Glad to hear the GPS glitches are fixed for you. Tridge has some ideas that the ublox can report a "Jamming" number which we could use to diagnose whether near by electronics are interfering with the GPS signal.
Nice work on the LEDs. For AC3.1 we're going to move most of the LED logic into an AP_Notify library. This probably means you'll need to modify your code a bit to keep it working but maybe I can give you some pointers on what will need to be changed. In short, your code will be called at 1khz so you'll likely just need to slow down your update rates.