Blogs

Hi All,

I just uploaded the last version of 2.5.0(3) I wanted this one to be rock solid before 2.5.1 came out.

I got a few hours today to tweak code and gains for my EZ Star. I implemented the derivative term in the heading/navigation loop and all the other loops used just the p term. The derivative term helped reduce overshoot by about 50%. I'm not kidding about the wind. The plane was flying at a 30° angle to fight the wind.

Altitude hold was working very well. Pitch_comp reduced to .1 was about all I needed. The airspeed control needs work, but Doug is tackling that.

I have my own personal ground station in Flash and I added uploading of all of the major variables in order to tune the aircraft in flight. This worked great so I'll leave the code included for the GCS team to check out. I didn't use error checking, I had the plane echo back the values so I could see if the uploaded values worked correctly before re-entering AP. It was far less complicated to do it that way than to try and implement errror-checking through code.

I've also implemented a simple dampening system for flying into the wind based on ground speed. Doug has a much more complex version, but this one worked remarkably well. Here you can see the loiter pattern. Please note that I was flying into a terrific headwind. The plane was moving 12 mph upwind and over 40MPH downwind. Sometimes the wind would pick up and the plane would virtually stand still, hence the strange patterns. Overall the snaking was minimal and far better than before. I was able to hold the 45m radius no problem. I could have cut that down to 30.

Altitude hold with 15 loops around home, then a landing.