I am fairly new to the multi rotor community, about a year to date, but I have been flying R/C for more than four decades. I am still learning many things about the Pixhawk. Until recently, I have been doing pretty tame close in flights only ranging out a couple of hundred feet and not doing much in the way of data collection. I have a 2D gimbal with Hero 3.0 for getting some shots.
Lately, I am having a couple of problems, the primary problem is flight related and the secondary is accessing my datalogs.
While flying in “Alt Hold” or “Loiter”, I have been experiencing poor altitude control. Lateral control seems fine as does yaw, but the quad will lose altitude while traversing and lately while in hover too. The first events occurred during lateral flight, when going from a hover to lateral flight, the quad would slowly lose altitude, most times well over a meter, once back in a hover it would slowly recover to the approximate original altitude. I am flying tame, not aggressive at all.
I tried doing a complete reset/re-cal. and for a couple of flights, all seemed well. However, then the quad began to lose altitude during hover as well (sometimes abruptly) and feels slow to respond to power increase while trying to recover. I have noticed that this erratic flight behavior is worse during windy conditions. If the winds are calm the hover problem is much less pronounced. I always wait for a good GPS lock, which usually only takes a few seconds.
These occurrences have become almost routine, to the point that I have grounded myself except for test flights. Due to high winds for the last few days, I have not flown at all.
The secondary issue is with my Mission Planner 1.3.41 software. I am trying to access the the logs, to try and diagnose my altitude issue, but When I hit the “Dataflash Log Via Mavlink”, a second window opens and in the “Output” box I get this msg, “getting list of log files… No logs to download”. I have tried to select a file directly by using the “Download selected logs” button, but no joy. There are files stored, I can select them, but they do not load. Bummed.
I look forward to the brain trust’s help with this.
Peace,Wolf D.