Drone show Copters exhibit instability/toilet bowling

Heyy guys,

I’m using my custom Firmware for my drones. Did a show of 20 drones and the takeoff and landing were not that stable. The drones were toilet bowling while takeoff and during the formations they were somewhat stable.

FYI the drones were calibrated, accel were calibrated, compass were calibrated, Compass motor calibration was done
My drone configuration:

3” props with Emax1404 4800Kva motor, 3s1p battery Li-ion, and my drone weighs 360gms including battery and all components

I’m attaching logs for study. Please help me with this.

I am not very confident in this analysis, but:

  • the low-level tuning seems quite good (maybe yaw is not as sharp as it could be, but that is likely not important for a drone show)
  • the actual velocities oscillate around the desired ones - all the time, not just at takeoff and landing
  • this is accompanied with 30ish degrees of deviation between ATT.Yaw and AHR2.Yaw, which indicates to me that there is still a compass problem of some sort.

This may be additionally exaggerated by severe vibrations in Y and especially in X, which both are frankly way too much for such a tame flight profile:

My advice would be to fix the vibration issues and to improve compass positioning (and then to redo compassmot, of course). Compass positioning is not easy on a 3" build, but people have done it successfully in the past.

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Toiletbowiling indicates bad heading estimate.

Your vibrations are too high.

Yet another issue, which is very prominent in the first log in particular, is that RCOU.C3 (front left motor, according to the frame configuration) dominates all other motor outputs. This seems to happen over a range of flight headings in various logs, and in my opinion is a reason to check for possible mechanical issues.

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I was doing the test for my new backup telemetry, so I thought RTK+ was not getting to the drones, so its mechanical issue and not related to the telemetry

To be more specefic my secondary telemetry is directly connected to the RTK board rather than FC, and the secondary telemetry is only sending RTCM3 + Base correction data