AutoTune: failing to level, manual tune may be req

Sorry, I over simplified my statement. We are dealing with aircraft ranging over:

  • 150 g to 500 kg
  • Thrust to weight of 10 : 1 to 1.5:1
  • ESC - Standard, active breaking, FOC
  • Battery voltage of 1 s to 100 s (4V to 400V)
  • Motor KV of 80 to 6000
  • Propellers of 3" to 60", 2 blades to 8, standard and ducted
  • Tri, Quad, Y6, X8, Hex, Octo, Dodeca
  • Frame design from floppy to rock solid
  • Autopilot mounting: hard mounted, internally isolated, home made isolation
  • Build quality of beautiful to shocking

We are building flying robots. If you are a hobbyist then enjoy the hobby and learn the basics of tuning:
https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/tuning-process-instructions.html

If you are a professional and consider the aircraft tuned after starting from the defaults and running auto-tune then I have some bad news, you are not a professional (too many barely rate as novice hobbyist).

Perhaps you should be talking to the manufactures of these aircraft and suggesting they take the time to have these kits professionally tuned so that they can provide a standard tune for their customers…

5 Likes

@Leonardthall I agree with your statement and as a member of dev team I can understand the scope and depth of the tuning process.

But my question is related to new user experience and trying to make it easy for them to get started. Allow me to repeat the question : What is the default vehicle target for the default PID as implemented in the Copter Firmware ?

And why I experience an issue with what I always considered as the standard model: 1-2Kg Quad - 500 frame 9-10inch propellers (That I had no problem autotuning until 4.x)

I can open a new thread on this if you wish but I consider that this question has quite essential to have a starting reference to the wiki

There is no “default vehicle target”. The default parameters are chosen to be safe for a wide range of aircraft. The goal is not to let a few people with a particular frame to have a good tune out of the box. The goal is to minimise the chance of injuring a person or damaging an aircraft on the first arm. Given the range of aircraft this alone is a difficult proposition.

Have you considered the possibility that the problem is this airframe, or the way you built it?

Have you went back to 3.x and tested autotune on this airframe?

By the time you get to the “AutoTune: failing to level, please tune manually” message. Autotune has already relaxed the level requirements by a factor of 2. I suspect a log with ATTITUDE_FAST turned on will show high vibration levels, oscillation, or some other serious problem. Of course you may have just been trying to autotune in too much wind with a sloppy tune.

But to be honest, jumping on the forum to blame autotune, 4.x, the default parameters with complete confidence that the aircraft and your build is perfect… well… I tend to work out why I am seeing something before I start telling other people they have got it wrong.

1 Like

Fair enough, as I wrote initially I don’t mind going down the Rabbit Hole searching for the root cause and report back.
And please don’t take it as a blame but as constructive comment on how to make the ArduPilot experience easier and fun.

1 Like

I’ve been watching this closely, as I’m very interested in the topic and Copter tuning in general. Is it naive of me to ask if you’ve used the Alt-A plugin yet?

The documentation of that feature is quite lacking, as I’m sure you know, although I am aware that it should be made more readily accessible in Mission Planner if it isn’t already.

Are you refering to @Eosbandi C# calculation plugin ?

My answer is no… Honestly, I was not expecting doing extensive tuning theses days :wink:

Yes, that’s the one. And I think there’s a pull request to make it a button on one of the tuning pages instead of an obscure key combo. I’ll admit that I haven’t checked to see if it’s been incorporated that way or not yet.

I confirm , it is installed on Mission Planner , and you access with Alt-A

or you can update to latest Béta Mission Planner and have it right on the setup tab instead of Alt-a

2 Likes

EDIT: Ok! The “easy button” has been released. Thanks for the update.

I’ve been meaning to go back and use it for the Copter I mentioned earlier in this thread, since I was unaware of the plug-in at the time. Still, my own problem wasn’t initial parameters so much as a misunderstanding of vibration damping. Incidentally, that Copter is very similar in size to the one you have, and the defaults worked well for me to get started.

So putting in my numbers and I got these, I’ll give it a try

Thanks Andras for this nice add-on :slight_smile:

1 Like

By the way, I put together a tuning parameters file for the S500 here. ardupilot/Holybro-S500.param at master · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub

2 Likes

I might be able to contribute a Holybro-X500.parm at some point.

1 Like

Following this issue.

Same thing happened to me today but it only happens in Yaw. I normally do my axis calibration seperatly. Using Holyybro durandal an 4.1 copter

Same here on a Pixhawk 4 on a (quad 17 inch 380kv 750 frame) so I don’t know if its related to bigger quads, as low Kv motors tend more vibrations, tried 4.13 and 4.2 master and both with the same issue error. However the quadcopter was able to do autotune in fw 4.07; for now autotune on the older Firmware then update to newer version.

That error message didn’t exist in 4.0.7. It’s produced if it can’t level between twitches which could just indicate a bad initial tune.

Out of curiosity, can the error appear if the wind conditions are too high for tuning?

That’s a good point, I believe so. Not settling within 2.5° in 5s wouldn’t take much it seems to me.

Yes, the community has become more an more lax on only doing autotune in little to no wind conditions. So this is a very real possibility.