After a rough start last month, my ArduCopter CindiLou showed what she could do today. See the attached video for four flights. In the first three the camera is pointing at the Cindi, and in the fourth I have mounted the camera on the forward landing gear so you get to see a rather dramatic crash from the quadcopter's POV. The wind was blowing quite strongly to the south the whole time.
I re-read the section on GPS / altitude hold and realized that I had misunderstood how altitude hold works; that was probably the cause of the crash. I'm looking forward to being competent enough to this thing reliably and am going to repair the quad and get back to flying it as soon as possible. I'm quite happy with the way I mounted my Countour HD camera on the front the landing gear. There's no stabilization and yet the quad video is steadier than the human-captured video!
Comments
Ground Loop, thanks for the advice! I was wondering about the sudden lack of motor sound in the video, very glad to have a sensible explanation for it.
And you're right that I should be trying to learn to control it and keep it nearby at a lower altitude. I think after two crashes on takeoff I acquired an irrational groundophobia. The sum total of my RC flying experience is that my brother handed me the controls of his fixed wing gas plane once or twice many years ago!
I've been wanting to buy a magnetometer, but they were out of stock before. Now I see they're in so I'm putting one on order today. Makes sense that the GPS hold behaves poorly without one, especially since it was fairly windy that day.
Hey Aaron, glad to see that you got her back in the air! I'm right behind you, as I just got my crash kit in the mail today.
-John
I don't mean to kick you when you're down, but I would suggest spending more time in "Stable" mode, at eye level maybe 20' from the ship. I could be wrong if you're already an experienced heli pilot, but it didn't look very "in control".
My Arducopter, with stock frame/build/code is so rock-solid stable (in Stable mode) that it will plant itself in the sky if there is no breeze. Only the smallest infrequent inputs are needed. Flys like a simulator.
Last, if you don't have a magnetometer, then don't attempt GPS Hold. It will do something like what you saw.
After watching your video, and listening to the audio, I believe that you too have been bitten by the "Safety" bug. You had the throttle down while trying to bring it lower in GPS Hold, right? Then you took it out of GPS Hold and attempted to throttle up quickly to stabiliize. BOOM, the "safety" code in ArducopterNG disarmed your ship and turned off all your motors.
You can hear the motors completely turn off in flight.
More info here:
http://www.diydrones.com/forum/topics/potentially-fatal-bug-in
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