The ArduPilot development team is very proud to announce the release of APM:Plane 3.8.0. This is a major release, with a lot of new features and improvements. The release has been a long time coming, and the dev team would like to thank everyone who has contributed, in terms of code and documentation as well as the many testers of beta versions of the code.
To help with migration from the 3.7.1 release to 3.8.0 there is a migration guide here:
All users should read the migration guide carefully. While the firmware will try to auto-migrate most settings, please do very careful ground tests before your first flight with 3.8.
In total there have been over 4 thousand changes in the ArduPilot git tree since the 3.7.1 release, with over four hundred of those specific to fixed wing aircraft. Listing all of them in these release notes is not practical, but the following list will give some of the larger
changes:
addition of EKF3 support (disabled by default)
new SERVO parameter system for servo output configuration
support for MS5525 airspeed sensor
support for a wide range of tiltrotor quadplanes
support for tailsitter aircraft (including vectored tailsitters)
support for twin-motor aircraft, with differential thrust
new system for elevon, vtail, flaperon and differential spoiler setup
support for deep stall landings
support for dual-gps blending
support for masking compass types for driver loading
completely new DMA based and high sample rate IMU drivers
support for px4pro board from Drotek
several new compass drivers, new IMU drivers and new GPS drivers
new MANUAL_RCMASK system for fine-grained MANUAL flight setup
support for log rotation on disarm
numerous quadplane improvements
fixed loiter behaviour with Q_GUIDED_MODE=1
allow rudder arming in CRUISE and FBWB modes
fixed bug in transmitter tuning support
fixed bug in attitude integrator zero on mode change
added SYSID_ENFORCE parameter
fixed support for vtail rudder-only planes
greatly improved automatic landing accuracy
support for high update rates on all servos with SERVO_RATE parameter
greatly improved UAVCAN support, with parameters now in CAN_ parameter space
support for prop-hang on 3D aircraft
improved quadplane PID logging
smoother takeoffs for quadplanes
logging of side-slip and angle-of-attack estimates
added AETR, pre-mixer logging
automatic thermalling support
The documentation has had a major update as well, with new setup guides for popular aircraft types, including 4-channel planes, elevon planes, vtail and flaperon setups, tailsitters, quadplanes and tilt-rotors.
Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release - it has been a long time coming, but I think it was worth the wait. The dev team hopes you enjoy flying it as much as we have enjoyed working on it!
Congratulations to the team! Amazing work!
I would like to know more about “greatly improved automatic landing accuracy”, what changes have you made or where I can read about those changes (besides the landing wiki doc)?
Thanks!
It turned out that we had a bug in the altitude calculation related to the glide slope for landing. When Michael and Tom reworked the landing code they fixed this bug as a side effect. Since then landing position accuracy has been a lot better.
Had successful auto mission today with 3.8.0 stable with rtk gps inject for navigation and time stamping photos on VTOL EX-Ranger quadplane, everything worked like a charm! My applied aeronautics albatross will be arriving tomorrow, then a cpl weeks to get it all installed and will be testing that as well.
I upgraded to 3.8 from 3.6. I notice some behaviours :
Throttle does not react with esc, strange bip from esc like it does not success to initialize (YEP esc : there is 2 bips then a long multi tone like buzeer pixhawk song but this multi tone was not here). I have to make correspond RC3_* values and SERVO3_*
Analog airspeed not working after upgrade : I change pixhawk analog to px4 analog and then back to pixhawk analog to make it working.
My µsd card was good, I use it previous day before upgrading and got a successfull log with 3.6. But when I upgraded to 3.8, bad I/O or that kind of message. I could still read with mavlink from Mission Planner but not log : bad logging. Format sd resolve the problem but I wonder why ! I tried switching back to 3.6, and got logs before formating …
I saved params (to restore it after), reset to default make reboot pixhawk and with safety swtitch not pressed, motor is running itself.
This is a huge release! thank you very much for the hard work!
For the camera to trigger control, I would like to be able to join the fixed-point exposure, I am not sure whether there is such a function or I did not find. Fixed-point exposure to help my plane in the ocean patrol beacon in his reasonable position and not destroyed.
Please forgive my English very poor, do not know if you can understand what I want to express!
I don’t understand what you mean - are you referring to triggering at a fixed latitude/longitude? You can do that with mission commands.
Cheers, Tridge
