Well, today, I will test it. Although there is snow on the ground, the temperature is warming up and so I plan to lay a blanket on the snow secured with cones as my landing pad. I fell confident enough that I’ve also created a simple waypoint mission. If today’s flight goes well, I will load the mission and try it out possibly next week, weather permitting.
My test flight was somewhat successful. Again, using default PIDs, I found the aircraft to be pretty unstable though I was able to control it.
I have a toggle switch on my transmitter which I use to operate the landing gear - up position to retract and down to extend. Unfortunately, my transmitter gets upset on power on if the switches are not all in the up position, so after powering up the transmitter, I flip the switch to the down position.
Upon take off, the landing gear did retract automatically, but later when landing in RTL mode, the gear failed to extend so I had to switch back to Stabilize, climb and extend the gear manually and switch back to RTL and land.
I was unable to maintain a steady hover - hard to find the right throttle setting where it didn’t climb or descend - will need more practice. Since I was alone, I had nobody to shoot video of the flight from the ground, but I did capture onboard video - it was terribly shaky due to the instability. At any rate, here is is click here.. I have started going through the First Flight and TUning instructions in the documentation and will try tweaking the PIDs in order to get a stable flight without oscillations.
Then you didn’t actually do this?
Forget about a video and just post a link to a log file.
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ArduPilot methodic configurator - No visible menus, no hidden menus, no complicated options, what you see is what gets changed.
It does do have a lot of configuration steps. But you do need them. @FossilRider Not doing them is what got you in this mess in the first place.
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There is a blind spot here with inexplicably flying, even once, with default parameters. One tends to learn by crashing and destroying hardware that this approach is senseless. Even the very basic Initial Tune Parameters screen in Mission Planner has been around for years now.
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From Ardupilot docs - setting-up-for-tuning:
PID Controller Initial Setup¶
The settings below are meant to get your PID controller acceleration and filter settings into the right approximate range for your vehicle. These parameters are critical to the tuning process. The PID controller default values for axis P/D/I values are usually safe for first test hovers of most vehicles.
Lots of people have begun the tuning process by starting with the defaultl values and tuning from there.
I used the configurator.
Using the configurator means using it and following it’s instructions in the sequence that they are presented.
Post the configurator files then
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So rather than set the parameters that are critical to the tuning process you will go with the defaults that are usually safe for most vehicles?
Why? How is that at all logical? What is the point of launching an unstable craft. What has been gained? To prove that default parameters are not suitable for this craft?
In any case when you post the Configurator Zip file it will probably be clear where you went wrong.
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