Hello, I have been flying arducopter for 3 months now and I have been a little surprised that the copter is very stable with the quite old 3.2.1 firmware, but one thing that has been very annoying is that I need to recalibrate the compass almost every week I fly. Is it normal?
But another issue that has been disturbing me lately is that this Sunday I wanted to fly in a different location, I flew there before, and calibrated the compass there before too but this time when I calibrated the compass the offsets were much different from normal (my normal offsets are around [-210, 15, 50]), but this time they were very close to 0 on all axis, maximum 10! Is that normal? The copter flew fine like always but after looking at the logs I noticed many compass / magnetic field interference issues, I also needed to calibrate it twice before it succeeding!
Also note that this happened the same day the world changed time, idk if that matters just pointing out.
I will fly tomorrow and calibrate it again in another location close to where I live and see the offsets!
Compass calibration is performed to record offsets from on-vehicle anomalies not for geographic location. There is no reason whatsoever to re-calibrate the compass(s) due to a change in location. The only reason to re-calibrate the compass is if there is a hardware change on the craft. And don’t confuse declination with correction offsets. They are 2 different things.
The compass is external with GPS attached on a stand, it can’t move at all. But remember that I use arducopter 3.2.1, does that version have the world magnetic model?