Blogs

The ArduPilot development team is very proud to announce the release of APM:Plane 3.8.0. This is a major release, with a lot of new features and improvements. The release has been a long time coming, and the dev team would like to thank everyone who has contributed, in terms of code and documentation as well as the many testers of beta versions of the code.

To help with migration from the 3.7.1 release to 3.8.0 there is a migration guide here:

http://ardupilot.org/plane/docs/plane-3-7-to-3-8-migration.html40

All users should read the migration guide carefully. While the firmware will try to auto-migrate most settings, please do very careful ground tests before your first flight with 3.8.

In total there have been over 4 thousand changes in the ArduPilot git tree since the 3.7.1 release, with over four hundred of those specific to fixed wing aircraft. Listing all of them in these release notes is not practical, but the following list will give some of the larger
changes:

• addition of EKF3 support (disabled by default)
• new SERVO parameter system for servo output configuration
• support for MS5525 airspeed sensor
• support for a wide range of tiltrotor quadplanes
• support for tailsitter aircraft (including vectored tailsitters)
• support for twin-motor aircraft, with differential thrust
• new system for elevon, vtail, flaperon and differential spoiler setup
• support for deep stall landings
• support for dual-gps blending
• support for masking compass types for driver loading
• completely new DMA based and high sample rate IMU drivers
• support for px4pro board from Drotek
• several new compass drivers, new IMU drivers and new GPS drivers
• new MANUAL_RCMASK system for fine-grained MANUAL flight setup
• support for log rotation on disarm
• numerous quadplane improvements
• fixed loiter behaviour with Q_GUIDED_MODE=1
• allow rudder arming in CRUISE and FBWB modes
• fixed bug in transmitter tuning support
• fixed bug in attitude integrator zero on mode change
• added SYSID_ENFORCE parameter
• fixed support for vtail rudder-only planes
• greatly improved automatic landing accuracy
• support for high update rates on all servos with SERVO_RATE parameter
• greatly improved UAVCAN support, with parameters now in CAN_ parameter space
• support for prop-hang on 3D aircraft
• improved quadplane PID logging
• smoother takeoffs for quadplanes
• logging of side-slip and angle-of-attack estimates
• added AETR, pre-mixer logging
• automatic thermalling support

The documentation23 has had a major update as well, with new setup guides33 for popular aircraft types, including 4-channel planes, elevon planes, vtail and flaperon setups, tailsitters, quadplanes and tilt-rotors.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release - it has been a long time coming, but I think it was worth the wait. The dev team hopes you enjoy flying it as much as we have enjoyed working on it!

Happy flying!

Thanks Tridge and ArduPilot development team!

(https://discuss.ardupilot.org/t/plane-3-8-0-released/19787)