How important is it on a rover for the flight controller to be level? My current controls location slopes downward toward the back, so that the front of the flight controller will be sloped upward at an 11 degree angle. I can fix this. Just wondering if I should worry about it. I never have worried about it with my other controllers (Pixhawk and Kakute F7 AIO), but maybe some of my AHRS issues have been related to that? Any adivice?
I have the entire plastic enclosure on rubber washers, and inside the box, I have a plywood back plate on rubber grommets. Currently, I have the Cube mounted flush to the plywood back plate. I am wondering if I ought to put it on rubber grommets also. I am tending to wait and see if I have vibration issues as discussed here: New 3D printed vibration mount for the Cube - Hardware / Pixhawk family - ArduPilot Discourse. I am on a mower, where I do not likely have high frequency vibration, but certainly have a lot of low frequency vibration from the engine and ground travel. Again, I have never worried about this issue in the past, but maybe I should.
I don’t have definitive answers, but I’ll explain what I’ve done to mitigate the potential problems of vibration and tilt on my mower.
The entire flight controller enclosure is mounted on the seat mount, which has some degree of isolation from the frame of the mower already. The Cube Orange is then atop on an off-the-shelf vibration damping mount. It’s probably overkill, but it’s certainly not hurting anything.
The seat mount is tilted up about 4.5°, which used to drive me nuts on the artificial horizon display, since I did a perfectly level offboard calibration, but it seemed to hurt nothing. I recently used the large vehicle calibration function to zero things out, which is visually nicer, but again, seemed to have no significant effect on the flight controller’s navigation. I’m sure that too extreme a difference between the flight controller’s real world orientation and its calbration (particlarly about the yaw axis on a rover) would have a negative effect.
I doubt an 11° tilt will affect much, either, but it’s trivial to calibrate the flight controller in its installed position with the mower on a reasonably level surface. Then the flight controller should compensate for orientation.
Thanks, Yuri. I did not realize there was a large vehicle calibration. That sounds like the ticket for the level issue.
I think I will wait and see how things go on the vibration. I never was aware af a vibration problem before, but compass troubles dominated my issues list so much that I just never got to that level.
