Major APM Bug(s) and/or Arducopter 2.8 Board Problem(s)

After days of testing and poring through help files, etc. I’ve figured out why my quad has been having so many problems. Here it is:

  1. APM is arbitrarily changing settings when I use the sub-menus such as “Basic Tuning” “Extended Tuning”, etc. Example, if I dare use the “Extended Tuning” configuration tab, it will zero out the Throttle P value to “0”. Every time. APM cares not what value is in the board, it will populate that with a “0” in APM and if you dare press “write” it will blow away whatever value was in there before.

  2. Each time I disconnect from my Arducopter 2.8 board from my Mac the software will not reconnect, I must restart the software. This isn’t a huge problem in and of itself, but it’s worth noting.

  3. If I dare connect to a PC vs my Mac (I tried that thinking the Mac software was the problem) and it blows away a huge range of settings instantly.

I have no way of knowing if this is an APM software problem inherently, or a problem with my board. But either way it’s a massive headache. I’ve gotten my quad tuned to fly nearly perfectly but extreme care is required to do any tuning. I have to use a snapshot of known good values and if I dare use any configuration dialogs vs. the “Full Config” tool I must compare the before/after values to figure out what’s been blown away and screwed up.

Hopefully this is helpful to any others who might be encountering random issues.

-Jeff

Perhaps a hardware problem? There is no official APM 2.8 board, so perhaps that’s a third-party clone.

Thanks, I’m absolutely sure this is a generic clone. I’ve got an RTFHawk on the way (at least I think it’s on the way) that hopefully will give me a better basis of comparison. Frustratingly, other than the random killing of settings, this board is flying just great.

-Jeff

what version of APM Planner 2.0 are you using? Try the latest one at firmware.diydrones.com/Tools/APMPlanner/beta for the newest one.

Thanks, I’ll give that a go this weekend and will report back on progress. Although the latest download for Mac won’t work to flash firmware for whatever reason. Seems to be a known issue and I had to install a special version I found digging through postings

I just tested the latest and it will work.

firmware.diydrones.com/Tools/APM … c5_osx.dmg

If you have any further issues I can fix it for you.

[attachment=0]APM2.6-FW-flash.png[/attachment]

Thanks Bill! I’ve installed the software and will be back home to test it out this weekend. I’ll follow-up if there are any issues. The good news is that these issues are very repeatable. So it’ll be easy to see if problems persist.

-Jeff

Hi Everest,

Any updates? I have the same problem of APM constantly changes setting every time APM reboots.

Thnx

I have similar issues (and more), did anyone get any further with this?

by the way dont download and use mission planner version 1,3,44 to update firmware of your apm 2.8 it won’t update your firmware they stop updating since almost 2 years ago, i found a work around, first uninstall mission planner after that 2- install apmPlanner2 instead 3-fire up apmPlanner2 4-now plug in usb port your apm 2.8 its gonna install everything after all done if you want to use mission planner, close apmplanner2-install mission planner-fire it up- plug in usb port your apm 2.8 and on the upper right corner be sure to be on the right com and set on 115200 baud rate clic connect, now it should work perfecly :slight_smile:

I see this posted periodically but I don’t understand the problem. I have several APM’s (2.6’s/2.7’s/2.8’s) and they update to the latest supported firmware (3.2.1) with no problem using Mission Planner (1.3.44 today). Simply choose the latest stable release (3.4.5 today) and it will recognize it’s an APM FC and install 3.2.1 with no other action required. You don’t have to manually select a previous version but you can and that will work also.