After months on the bench, gradually learning about the Pixhawk ecosystem, as well as DragonLink Advanced, 1.3G FPV, MissionPlanner, Tower, etc., I finally chucked my Radian Pro aloft yesterday. No trauma, no foam yard sale, and plenty of log files to study. I flew several batteries worth, and have dataflash logs and MP logs here on dropbox. (Please advise if you cannot see four subdirectories with param files, MP logs, dataflash logs, terrain files; I am not a blackbelt in dropbox permissions).
Summary: Running ArduPlane 3.5.1 and MissionPlanner 1.3.37. Hardware is PixFalcon, M8N GPS and compass, digital airspeed sensor, Holybro PixFalcon power board (Mauch standing by ready for install soon), DLAv3 Rx running SBus and full bi-directional telemetry to/from MP, microMinimOSD running night_ghost’s firmware. First flight was in manual mode, trimming on the 14SG radio to get stable flight. Then I re-ran radio calibration on MP, then tried AutoTune, RTL, and FBWA and FBWB modes. I downloaded the params after the session, and saw no changes to PIDs, and I suspect it might be due to ARSPD_FBW_MIN being too high for the Radian Pro. Winds were about 10kts, and I am fairly certain my digital airspeed sensor is reading too high. I also notice I have TRIM_ARSPD_CM = 1600 cm/sec = 35.8 mph! Is that too high for a foam glider that stalls in the mid teens of knots? I suspect so. My end goal is to optimize the parameters for thermal hunting, so power-on flight is not the focus, though obviously key to a successful RTL in certain circumstances, so worth spending some time on.
On a related note, I read the issues dialogue on github regarding stall prevention over the past year, and wonder if I should have it off during my initial setup and [auto] tuning. Thoughts?
I also noticed that something about my startup sequence is throwing the stock E-flite ESC that came with the Radian Pro to freewheel rather than brake, so I’ve got that to solve. The startup chimes from the ESC are different than with a stock Radian Pro.
I have two hours of Mobius hat cam footage, but those files total almost 12gb, so unless they’re crucial to analyzing yesterday’s flights, they’re likely headed to the digital dumpster soon. I tried to record FPV on my Fatshark HD’s, but don’t use that DVR often enough to have pressed the right buttons. Hopefully next flights I will have good visuals from the cockpit.
Trivial issue someone might be able to answer: date/time stamps on dataflash logs, they have date correct, and time relative to each other correct, but are off by about 7 hours. Perhaps timezone is set to GMT? How can I change that to my timezone?
I’ve got a lot to work on during this next session, hopefully today, but would appreciate any insight from the experts on parameters, dataflash logs, or MP logs. I am slowly learning the various tools for replaying the flight in MP, graphing the MP logs, and graphing the dataflash logs. Lots to study! If anyone has a good parameter file for something like a 2 meter [foam] glider, I would be interested to study that.
Thanks all,
Kelly