How to upgade Skyviper to latest ArduCopter?

I remember seeing somewhere that the Skyviper fork was “hoped” to eventually be merged back into the AP Master. I’ve seen a lot of the changes that are in the SV fork that were pushed back up, but I’m just wondering how compatible the SV is with later version of AP? Would it be possible to upgrade it to the latest Arducopter at some point? I know that eventually, perhaps already, the toy vendor won’t be paying you guys to maintain an old product anymore, but it’d be nice if I was able to maintain it myself and periodically get new changes from the community.

How would this work? If it isn’t currently possible, is there a backlog of work that needs to be done to push SV changes upstream to the master so that it could work?

thanks.

Seriously not trying to be a smart ‘a’ but what’s missing that we could actually use? I’m blown away by all the configuration settings we have. The number of action settings for the buttons, the rangefinder stuff and so much else.

We’ll the SV is on pre-Arducopter 3.5 (I think) and they’re about to release 3.6
which adds a new loiter with better algorithms, optical Flow is built in,
boat mode and many other adds. The main point is I want it to be on an
actively developed branch so I can take advantage of the new features if I
want.

By the way, the optical Flow code is not in the sv2450. They’ve been adding that code to a separate branch. That functionality is not making it to your SV. It’ll be in these new models, and probably (definitely?) Won’t be back ported to the 245p.

Hello,

To use ardupilot master on SV, you could use

waf configure --board=skyviper-v2450
./waf build --target=bin/arducopter

And then follow http://ardupilot.org/dev/docs/skyviper.html or use APWeb to upload the .abin !

Is master considered a stable branch? I guess i need to figure out which of the releases includes the skyviper build configuration.

It depends on what you need : if it is for fun, yes master is stable enough to fly, you may need to update your param from time to time.
If it is for a business, them no master is not that stable …
Normally master is flyable. It could append that a bug wasn’t catch but normally it is safe to fly.
I only use master and I think most other dev alway fly with master

ok I’ll have to check it out. I was hoping to get some inputs from the team that worked on the SV on what issues I may have with the master branch (in case it still doesn’t contain some SV specific code)

thanks for the help!

I’ve created a wiki page and a video to show how to upgrade to the latest ardupilot software.

Now, this is how to upload “latest” which is “bleeding edge”. Once we get into beta testing of Copter-3.6 then a “beta” version will be available and when 3.6 goes live there will be a “stable” version as well. I’ll update the wiki as we progress.

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Hey! Awesome addition to the wiki! It’s very detailed. Thank you. By the way, the ability to control the vehicle during RTL is extremely useful, is there a reason that hasn’t been merged upstream too?

The current implementation works well on the SkyViper frame.

The mechanism used may lead to controller issues on other frames.
Hopefully with some of the new work Leonard and Randy have been doing we
might generally be able to add stick-mixing to autopilot modes - but no
guarantees, let along timeframes :slight_smile:

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Hmm is it something you can attach to “toy mode” implementation?

So, just wanted to chronicle this here. After upgrading to a non-skyviper version of AP, the Skyviper app doesn’t work anymore. It has nothing to do with compatibility, but the App sees that your version isn’t their latest verison and gives you a popup asking if you want to upgrade the firmware.

On the popup, it gives you a nice “skip” button…but it is greyed out. Score another one for Skyviper app bugs.

Also, and this was my stupidity (or maybe ignorance). After loading the SV with master, I opened the Flight parameters page and it appeared that all my parameters were still there. So i assumed that the parameters must not be overwritten…then today I did an RTL…and let it come all the way and land…and it BANGED into the ground extremely hard. I have no idea why. My handling had been VERY flawless the whole time…so clearly there were some parameters set correctly. But, for some reason it just slammed extremely hard. Unfortunately I did not have the SD card in because I’m…dumb.

So I noticed that on the RTL descent, it still did the quick drop, then slowed at about 10m, then instead of a slow steady descent to the touchdown it came down fast…but even if the settings were wrong, it should have had an idea of where the ground was right? Or maybe it did, and these tiny brushed motors just aren’t strong enough to quickly stop a descent…anyways…it appears to still be alive lol

To a skyviper developer @peterbarker ? , I assume I should be able to go into APWeb and click “restore defaults” and it’ll reset my 3.6-master Parameters to the SV factory settings? Is that the reason that it might have landed so hard? never had it do that before. fortunately, this little frame is extremely resilient!

hmm also cannot get Solex to connect to it anymore either. Very strange.

Edit: Had to reset SERIAL1_PROTOCOL back to Mavlink1

It currently is in the main SkyViper release branch (which you can compile
and run if you feel like it :wink: ) It periodically gets rebased on master.