We tested our Pixhawk on a 3DR Y6 in a high RF enviroment today.
We use multicopters to measure the radiation patterns of Broadcast masts. Up until a few weeks ago we have been using DJI A2 with fair good success, but we want to switch to using Piixhawk because of the open source situation giving us the ability to tap into the controller’s telemetry used with our measurements and a whole lot of other good reasons!
We are very happy with what we see with the Pixhawk.
The high RF environment did affect the controller when you start hitting the main beam of the transmission antennas. The moment it hits the main beam it sort of cuts out drops several meters and then recovers again.
I need some help with analyzing of the logs to determine exactly what is affected within the controller when in this harsch environment.
based on the sensor redundency (you have dual accels, dual gyros and dual mags), I don’t see any sensor errors. Perhaps the ESCs were affected?
Next time you do a test, try using a more recent arducopter firmware which has the EKF, and set LOG_BITMASK to log as much as possible (you don’t have raw baro logging enabled for example).
Cheers, Tridge
I have maybe seen the same in high RF area… If you take a look at the details of my experience in this posthttp://ardupilot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=9626, you will maybe see some similar behavior to your situation.
We are planning to provoke some more situations and understand what parts of electronic is affected and what we can do with it.
This happend in low RF enivronment, but anyway, our experience may be indicating advantage of shielding electronics:
We did flights and experienced some hiccups on two testflights, but didnt lead to any crash. The hiccups lasted for aboute 1 second each time. The logs told us there was some abrupt RC inputs (we are using PPM from Graupner reciever) on places that we did not expected.
After those flights we covered the PPM-wire with aluminium foil. Since that we have never experienced hiccups any more.
This can be random, but also maybe not. I dont know, but I will iike to start to shield electronics when I can,