Did Mission Planner erase my eeprom?

Ground Control Software Mission Planner
1

Been flying with APM for 1 1/2 years now so not a noob but also no expert. Today something weird and frustrating happened.

While setting up for an auto/ mapping mission I went through all my pre-flight checks, made some last adjustments on the camera gimbal, uploaded the photo mission via mavlink and changed the battery setting from 4000mah to 5000mah. Then I disconnected and changed over to the 5000mah flight battery but after APM bootup all the esc’s started beeping (this has never happened before) so I rebooted again and again but always beeping. So I connected via mavlink and it tells me “PreArm – RC not calibrated” so I recalibrated the radio but this does not work, so I check the radio trims and re-calibrated the esc’s (since they were beeping) and did radio calibration again but nothing works. I packed everything up and went home mumbling profanities.

On further inspection now I see all my APM settings are gone, everything appears to be default settings, my flight modes are all stabilize, PIDs are all changed, battery is 3s 3300mah which I do not even own, ect. ect. Can anyone please help explain what has happened here? I have been flying this particular quad since last fall with no issues and yesterday I did 3 auto/photo missions with a Nex5n with awesome results. I really hate to start over setting up the APM, it was flying so great and suddenly it appears erased. Sadly I did not have a .param file saved since I did not foresee this happening.

The only thing I did that was out of the ordinary was changing the battery setting to 5000mah (initial setup - optional hardware - battery monitor). It was a bit hard to see my laptop mouse in the sun but I don’t believe I clicked anything else (like Wizard) other than I uploaded a mission.

Now on the computer things also get a bit strange, before this event at 15:09 today all the telemetry logs went to a folder LOGS_QUADROTOR_1. While I was in the field the logs started going to a new folder LOGS_QUADROTOR_179, this is about the time I started having problems.

One more thing that may (or may not) be related, I can not retrieve the data flash logs, if I try to get them over Mavlink I get “Error, Cannot get log list” And I can no longer connect via USB because I now get a Windows message (via Device Manager) telling me “Windows cannot start this hardware device because its configuration information (in the registry) is incomplete or damaged.”

I am using Mission planner 1.2.95; Arducopter 3.1; Windows 7 64bit

It looks like I will have to update everything and start over, is there a way to restore it from the Tlogs, or maybe an older Dataflash log?

I really hope somebody can shed some light on what may have happened here so I can take measures to prevent it happening again. I attach one Tlog before this event and one after not sure if it will help anyone, quad never left the ground today.

2

Can’t help you with the why part of this incident, but you can pull all your original setup parameters from any dataflash log (I don’t know about tlogs as I seldom use them). If you have saved any parameter files while you were in the Advanced Parameter screen, you could just restore from there. Or, if they are old, just open one in a text file and have a look at it. You’ll see the structure is very simple and obvious.

Then, pull one of your dataflash logs into a text editor and delete everything that isn’t part of the parameter file. With very little work you can have it looking just like a param file. Save the edited text file with a .param extension, and load it into Mission Planner from the Advanced Parameters page. After making sure all the values you loaded look good, write to the APM. You probably should do radio, compass and accel calibrations again, just to be onthe safe side.

3

Thanks otherhand, I did find a screenshot of my PIDs at least and I do have a non current .param file to look at for formatting, and of course I will have to a bunch of setup procedures over again. For now I am letting it sit as I need some cool down time and the weather here sux for flying right now, I really want to figure out how this could have happened, did I maybe do something wrong? Was there some weird bug in that version of MP? Is there something wrong with my board?

I sort of suspect it had something to do with me going into the Initial Setup menu to change the battery info since all settings seem to have gone to default (initial setup). But I don’t like to use the “B” word since people often seem too quick to blame software/firmware.

I really don’t want to fix it up and go flying again until I at least have a theory of what might cause this.

Also, I forgot to mention its a 3DR APM2.6, not a clone or anything.