I’m trying to test the motors on a little quad I just decided to convert to AC. However, when I click on one of the motor test buttons all I get is an endless beep from the buzzer until I disconnect the battery. The motors seem to do nothing at all. In MP messages however, it says “Motor test started” - “Motor test complete”.
First question would be if the buzzer is supposed to go off during motor test, or if it’s some kind of warning - maybe something I should have done previously is missing? But in messages, there is no indication of that.
The beep is an arming warning from the FC and is standard.
By default the % value and time in seconds are quite low and many motors won’t spin with those values.
Up the time a few more seconds and up the % until the motor spins.
Ah ok, thanks. I never expected AP’s very long arm beep to go off on motor test, as in this case, everybody really should have their props off. Can it be disabled for motor test only? I usually made it a habit to make my buzzers pluggable (originally due to erratic buzzer behaviour in iNav) but this quad is so small that I’d like to avoid it.
That’s exactly why I’m here and why I’m converting existing models to AP where possible, and why I’m using it for all new ones. On this little craft for example, some pre-testing showed that only AP is able to display correct gyro roll and baro values. iNav and BF are both displaying erratic values, for whatever reason. The FC cannot be broken if everything looks ok in AP, which already proved to be much better on planes for me.
It worked now without problem, I just disconnected the buzzer to protect my hearing.
Thanks for the hint, I had already taken a note to pay special attention to that when I read about copter setup a while ago. Actually a 10" quad I’m building was supposed to be my first ArduCopter but now I got so annoyed with this 3" one that I decided to convert it right away.
Personally I don’t see any reason to put either iNav or ArduCopter an anything as small as a 3" quad.
I ran iNav on a 5" quad and I wasn’t impressed, so I went back to BetaFlight. When I got my Tryo79 I didn’t even consider using either iNav or ArduCopter.
It is a challenge to get a small quad flying well with Arducopter but I have a 5" (210 frame) that flies great and before I obliterated it in a crash a 3" that was flying OK. But yea, Betaflight in the default Flight Mode just works. One reason is you don’t need the accelerometer, many just disable it in firmware.
I went from iNav to BF with this quad because of weird things happening (no need to go into details, I wasted too much time on it already) because I thought exactly the same: You can’t go wrong with BF to make a quad “just work”. But in fact there were other types of strange behaviour with it on BF (weird baro, unstable gyro, LEDs not working).
Additionally, my original idea was just to have a tiny GPS copter that can go quite far with 900MHz. But not only is BF’s “Rescue Mode” no real RTL/RTH - it also didn’t work at all when I activated it. I really wonder why they didn’t just clone iNav’s RTH - at least that’s a part of iNav that always worked for me.
As I’m building the 10" ArduCopter at the same time, I guess it can’t hurt to try out the initial configuration and maiden flight/tuning routine with a perfectly harmless little quad.
I take it the “initital settings calculator” I’m just about to use will also output usable values for 3"?
Well, yes… But you can expect quite a bit of tuning beyond that. The dynamic Notch filter is particularly useful for small craft. Read up about that and be prepared to follow the procedures
Sounds like it couldn’t hurt looking at the values of your deceased 3" for comparison, if you still have them? This is a 130mm frame with 1106 4500kv motors.
The last parameter file I found was on 3.7-dev which was before the dynamic notch. Also batch logging was unstable which made it a real pain to tune. Those problems are fixed now which would make tuning so much easier. I would suggest running the latest Dev version (4.1.0-dev) and use FFT as reference for the notch filter or ESC telemetry.
Looks like it might be a while until I can take care of that since I just had another R9 module fail and will convert everything to Crossfire now, which will take some time…
