I have my switch working right, I can see circle mode when I activate it, I can see it move servos on the ground, but very very little.
I have LIM_ROLL_CD cranked to 60 since it’s supposed to mean bank angle of 20 (it gets divided by 3) for circling, but basically while I can see circling working on the ground when I tilt the plane, but once in the air, flipping the switch seems to make the plane fly straight away from me
Now, RTL does actually work. it brings the plane back to me and circles (although way too high despite ALT_HOLD_RTL lowered to 2000 (20m).
I tried auto calibration (brand new setup), and I’m not sure how well that worked. I did do the 25 left and right, and the up and down barely do anything. I can see the plane barely nosing up or down, but ever so slightly.
How can I debug this on the ground without flying? Is there a way to debug circling or RTL by feeding fake flight data and seeing what the plane does?
And from this description, could you guess what I might have set wrong to have circling not work?
How long did you let the plane fly after selecting Circle mode? I had my first try of using circle yesterday and after selecting the mode I was thinking that my glider was flying away but I left it alone and it did actually circle, just that the circle radius was very much larger than I was expecting.
[quote=“daveymg”]How long did you let the plane fly after selecting Circle mode? I had my first try of using circle yesterday and after selecting the mode I was thinking that my glider was flying away but I left it alone and it did actually circle, just that the circle radius was very much larger than I was expecting.
Dave[/quote]
Yep, that was indeed the problem. The circle is so huge and doesn’t compensate for wind (by design) that it would cause my plane to go so far that I was worried it wasn’t circling.
So I did more tests. It does circle, but the circle radius is so huge that it could go out of my view easily.
I’ve tried increasing LIM_ROLL a bit more, but I can’t really do that because this causes RTL to bank too much and stall the plane (which is understandable)
I think I really only need a way to increase the bank angle for circle mode, and I’m not sure one can do that. Am I correct?
I was using mostly out-of-the-box settings for my testing, the circle radius would have been around 100m. I haven’t gone too deeply into the tuning settings yet so can’t comment on setting the circle bank angle. My model is 2m wing span so maybe pulled a smaller turn radius for the default setting.
