Soaring/Gliding for Planes

Hi Sam, I want to share with everyone that I have ridden my ASW 28, a Matek Analog Pitot, and that today I have flown wonderfully with Soaring.
It is clear to me that it is absolutely necessary, to mount an ARSPD, for Soaring to work.
I suppose that today’s flight can be improved a lot, but from the outset I can firmly affirm that Soaring WORKS, and that it does it very very well.
My flight area is quite poor in Termicas, due to its proximity to the sea, but even so, Soaring is able to detect the slightest descent and take advantage of it.
Basically I have your same parameters, adapted to my FC, an Omnibus F4 pro, and I have only taken as a reference some Sonic parameter, which seemed more accurate than yours, sorry for the livertad in this regard.
Thank you for everything, and my congratulations to you and the entire group, for the great work that is being done.
I am enclosing my flight records.
https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApA-NQi5IsByh27jthB_TMNs-dYF?e=baX5iW

Interesting that it gives a similar result. I suspect that in future with more dynamics flight, e.g. with speed to fly enabled, the formulation in terms of load factor might be preferable. Thanks for looking at that!

Hi Jose,

I’m glad it’s working for you now. An airspeed sensor will probably always give a performance advantage and in my opinion it is worth the small cost. We’ve updated the wiki to make the recommendation a bit clearer. However with time we can no doubt improve operation without an airspeed sensor to some extent.

Sam

Hi Sam, I have loaded version 4.1 Beta, and I have entered the same parameters of my .param, from the last successful flight.
I want to ask, if I should change any parameters, or do I continue with the same ones from the Dev version.
Thank you.

Hi Jose,

Same parameters should work fine.

For anyone using the Matek F405-Wing, soaring had to be temporarily disabled in new firmware builds to save flash space. This affects “latest” builds from the last week and 4.1beta1.

Since then flash space has been saved in other ways and soaring will be re-enabled soon.

So if you have a F405-Wing and want to update, you will need to hold off for a few days for “latest” builds, or for 4.1beta2 (probably won’t be long).

Hello again Sam, after reading what you put in the previous post, I think I may have problems with the Beta version.
My FC is an Omnibus F4 Pro, after all it is an F4 with a STM32 micro, just like the one that equips the Matek F405 Wing.
Therefore, if you do not tell me something that I do not know, if I load the Beta version, I cannot have Soarin.
You tell me what I can do.
Thanks.

Hi Jose,

You’re fine on Omnibus F4 Pro, the list of enabled features can be different even if the CPU is the same.

Sam

Hello sonicdahousecat, can you tell me which version of Ardupilot you are using on your flights.
I have many doubts about the PID configuration parameters, because I see that your configuration is very different from Samuel’s, which is the same as me.
Thanks.

Hi Jose, I did the first flights with Sam’s glide-polar-learn branch, but I was struggling with a DShot problem, so I tried Master.

Hello SonicHousecat, I have had a serious problem, in my ASW 28, and it was left for a lot of repair, for this I have bought a Multiplex Lentus like yours, and I would like if possible, would you tell me how you have mounted the Matek H743, and the GPS. The Pitot I am riding an Analog Matek, in the tail, but I would also like you to tell me, you carry it on the knob.
Thank you and happy flights.

Hi Jose,

I put the controller and GPS on the “1-01463 Fuselage filling piece (landing gear)”:


Airspeed sensor SDP33 without housing is in place for the trim weight (ball bearing):

With 2365g, I tried to get close to Multiplex’s weight specification of 2400g, since I assume the wings were designed for that weight.
I use the CG at 67mm as suggested in the instructions.

There are some caveats with my setup.
10.5 m/s (TRIM_ARSPD_CM 1050) is close to stall speed, so stall will definitely occur at 7 m/s (ARSPD_FBW_MIN 7). I still need to find a good combination for STALL_PREVENTION, ARSPD_FBW_MIN and the resulting bank angle limit.

With my DShot issue, I need to do a “Preflight_Reboot_Shutdown” to get the motor running. ESC telemetry is not working most of the time.

I tried FPort but could not get the telemetry to work.

I had an inflight reboot while trying five spline waypoints in an infinite loop (do_jump -1).

If you want to use the original ROXXY ESC, be careful with two BECs.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Hello SonicHousecat, thank you very much for the information and the photos, they are very helpful.
I also thought of mounting on the "1-01463 Fuselage filler piece (landing gear), but in my case I have bought the retractable landing gear, and at the moment I don’t know whether to mount it, due to the overweight it produces of 173 grams. If you can give me an opinion on this.
I have little left to finish the fuselage, and I hope to be flying Soarin very soon.
Thank you and happy flights.

Hi Jose, I’ve seen pictures where they put the receiver on the landing gear.
But I’m not sure if that’s a good idea for a flight controller.

Regarding the little extra weight of landing gear, I would not expect a big impact on the performance.
You will need to fly a bit faster, so the wings can produce the additional lift.
Basti’s Lentus with the 4S3P Li-Ion setup weighs about 3000g and he can fly it surprisingly slow (post 315).

Hello, as I mentioned in a back post, I had a serious problem with my ASW 28, which was quite bad.
I put a .log file, so that you can analyze the problem.
What I can comment on is that the flight was good all the time, until at one point, the plane went into inverted flight, and no longer went out of inverted until it hit the ground.
In the graphics you can see that the aileron servos go to the end of the travel, and roll 108º, in that position I did not obey the controls, not even doing RTL Mode.
It is as if the IMU is upset.
The controller was an Omnibus F4 Pro, Ardupilot 4.1 Beta.
You will tell me if you find something that justifies this problem.
Thanks.

https://1drv.ms/u/s!ApA-NQi5IsByh3AkPbPejby3oRwy?e=jZyZ5Q

Sorry, I turned 180 degrees

In case you are interested, to analyze why it was put in reverse flight, this occurred just at the time, which went from manual flight to cruise flight.
Instantly, it went into inverted, sort of like the IMU going crazy, or some Ardupilot problem, at that moment lost control.
All this I communicate, in case you can send this problem, to the Ardupilot developers, to find a solution in 4.1 beta2 or beta 3.
All the best

Hi Jose,

Difficult to tell what’s going on there. It looks like perhaps the problem occurred before you switched into CRUISE mode. You had a large uncommanded roll and by the time you changed mode the aircraft was at -75 deg pitch and 110 deg roll. From there autopilot was asking for full roll rate which seems the correct action. I’d recommend checking the aileron servos; I have replaced mine with DS113MGs because two of the stock servos failed.

Sam

SOAR: WRONG APPROACH BEING USED

I see everyone here working to optimize their planes with precise, complicated parameters to get the last few percent performance out of them in order for SOAR to work. The problem with the SOAR feature is they way it measures and tries to stay centered in lift. So in other words, everyone is concentrating on a little more efficiency to compensate for a SOAR that is not really working. Going to a huge amount of effort to get a few percent of performance rather than just fix the program to stay in lift which would result in HUGE gains is the WRONG APPROACH…

Virtually ANY foam FPV plane can be made to soar, with no need for an airspeed indicator or other complicated parameters being set. See the attached picture, I soar all kinds of FPV planes using ArduPilot FBWA mode all the time, no airspeed indicator, using only vertical speed measured by Ardupilot, and get great results, and I can do this with virtually ANY of my FPV planes. My technique is basically simple math and could very easily be programmed into Ardupilot and work incredibly well… Yet SOAR is not able to stay in and use the same thermals I fly manually :frowning:

There is absolutely no reason for it to be like this, other than that Samuel is using the WRONG approach, and wasting all his programming time in solving the wrong problems. The result is a SOAR feature that is very difficult to set up and use, and only works for a handful of people. I just hate to see such a neat potential not being used because the programmer refuses to address the basic task of measuring and staying in thermals.

Here we are, an entire year after I first proposed the easy solutions to this, with a SOAR feature that only works for a few people, and requires unreasonable amount of effort time time to set up.

IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE THIS WAY. If Samuel Tibor is unable / unwilling to address the basic functionality of SOAR, Is there someone else that could work on a soar feature ??? There needs to be some competition here, as it would be easy for a programmer that took the right approach to soaring to make a SOAR version that required only simple, quick setup, and easily outperform what we are stuck with now.

I don’t want to get in the middle of any arguments or step on any toes, but I am slightly interested in soaring algorithms. You said you proposed something a year ago? Is it written up/described in some sort of algorithmic form. In your post it sounds like you the human are able to do better than the current ardupilot algorithm, but it wasn’t clear if you have a better algorithm to propose, or just were commenting that you are able to do better when manually flying the aircraft?