I am experiencing trouble with the current sensor. I am using the attopilot 180a. In mission planner it does not detect any current flow. I thought it was a problem with the Pixhawk but after speaking with 3D Robotics we chased down all of the known possibilities. Or so we thought. They sent me a new Pixhawk and I began setting it up as before. After setup I gained additional problems as well as the Pixhawk not reading the current flow. I have double checked all of my settings in mission planner and all of my connections. As a test I connected a multimeter to the outputs of the attopilot. I noticed the voltage for the volts output (which seems to be working in Mission Planner) reads 1.51v when my battery measures 23.7v. on the current output i notice the multimeter reading 2.3- 111mv as I increase the throttle on the quadcopter. My question is this. Is this a normal reading on the attopilot 180a board? If so, how do i get Mission Planner to read these values. If not, what what possible fixes are there. I performed another test with the 3D Robotics battery monitor using a 4s battery and it too does not read the current flow. I am baffled.
the additional problem i gained was the new Pixhawk even when setup to motor spin at start up does not. I am leaning on issues on the Pixhawk but that does not explain the problems on the first Pixhawk
Hi,
I recently built a hexacopter and am noticing battery monitor issues with my Pixhawk and 3DR power module similar to what you describe. Did you ever figure out a solution? Actually, I am leaning toward concluding something is physically wrong with the power module voltage divider circuit, but it’s just a guess. Every time I fly, I get wildly fluctuating voltage readings from my telemetry setup.
Sorry to hear y9 are having troubles too. In my case, I feel that my voltage reading was good but, I could not get the Pixhawk to read the current. After all the time with tech support I decided that I would chase down the problem myself. I tried downloading qground control to see if I could get a reading on that planner. It required me to format and flash a different firmware on t9 the Pixhawk. Once That was done I saw that it read the current draw. I then formated and flashed bacteria to use Mission Planner. Once I connected up I had the current reading. With a bit of tweeting I had it up and running great.
Now for you, I don’t know if this is your problem. I think though that it would be advisable for anyone to format and flash on first setup. That way you know exactly what is on the boards.
Try going to Pixhawk.org . There you can get additional information. The downloads page offers links to qground control. It was pretty straight forward. Once you load up qground it’s makes you do the flashing to use it. Here is the page pixhawk.org/firmware/downloads
It seems that you used Qground to flash your pixhawk to read the current data. So, your pixhawk is running pixhawk flight stack, rather than APM flight stack, right?
I flashed it to use QGROUND then flashed it back to use APM. I believe that the firmware was stuck with a bug. Re-flashing seems to have cured my problem. The problem has not returned in the months that I have used it since performing this (fix).