This is a minor release, with a few small fixes and one important crash bug fix.
The crash bug is in the Septentrio (SBF) GPS driver. Anyone flying with an SBF GPS should update to this release. The driver had a bug that could cause a in-flight crash under some circumstances.
The only change in this release since 3.8.2beta1 is the addition of MANUAL_CONTROL support.
Other changes in this release are:
support takeoff in GUIDED mode for quadplanes
support changing target altitude while hovering in GUIDED mode for quadplanes
improved descent rate control in QRTL and QLAND modes. This fixes an issue with higher than configured descent rates, and smoothes out the change in descent rate for the change to the final landing stage
smooth out the transition to QLOITER or QLAND when transitioning from fixed wing mode. This prevents the sudden nose up when changing to QLOITER or QLAND mode while flying at high speed.
added MANUAL_CONTROL support, allowing for joystick control from QGroundControl
This is great news. Could you share more information on how it works? Does it wait a period of time or for airspeed to drop below a given point before locking on to a position?
What it does is ramp the maximum pitch from the pitch it started at when it entered QLOITER or QLAND up to the normal Q_ANGLE_MAX over the Q_TRANSITION_MS time.
The start of the ramp is from when you last used the VTOL motors for Z control, so if you were already in a vtol mode it does nothing, but if you were in fixed wing it ramps the limit over the transition time. That works pretty well in practice.
Interesting, so if you switch from FBW to QLoiter it will still try to fly backward to the location at which you flipped the switch but blew past, it just does it less aggressively.
I was hoping it worked by delaying the grabbing of the gps location until it has slowed down a bit. I don’t ever want to fly backwards in a Quadplane. I want it to transition by smoothly decelerating to a hover and then holding that position. I’ll just keep using FBW -> QHover -> QLoiter with careful timing, but was hoping for something simpler.