Trying to get my quad to circle around things using missions written from MP, but I can’t change direction. The notes at Copter Notes show a Direction field, but that is not labelled in the current MP and there appears to be another unlabelled field as well. I have created a simple mission with 2 separate orbits, with +1 in the fields in one and -1 in t’other as in the piccie, but my quad just flew clockwise. Any ideas?
Use a negative value for the CIRCLE_RATE parameter for CCW.
So you can’t use the planning functions to set the direction of a turn? The notes for Loiter Turns in the Mission Command List suggest that you used to be able to. It seems a bit dumb to be only able to circle in one direction. Sure, have a default for “Loiter”, especially for airplanes, but multicopters? This looks to me like something has changed and this functionality has been lost.
Unfortunately there is a fairly fundamental limitation in how AP stores commands to eeprom that doesn’t allow us enough room to store the direction field (we use a fixed structure instead of a dynamic structure). I’m sure eventually we will resolve this but the issue has been there forever actually so I’ll update the wiki to correct this. Txs for the report.
1 Like
Just don’t be tempted to put a negative value in the Turns field! You will think it’s flying away…
Hi @rmackay9
Ok, thanks for that. Just a suggestion for a fix - I am going to presume that there is a variable in the routine that stores the CIRCLE_RATE parameter - would it be possible to have a mission command e.g. DO_REVERSE_CIRCLE_DIR that simply multiplies that variable by -1? That would avoid having to change a fixed structure, but use the dynamic nature of variables. (I have to confess that it is a long time since I have coded anything more complicated than an Excel macro and have certainly not looked at the underlying source code).