Tuning the slop and wobble out of an 18" quad

ArduCopter Copter 4.5
1

Hi,
I’m seeking some guidance as to next steps to clean up stability performance of this Quad.

I’m getting back into ArduCopter after a long break, and trying to find my way around how to tune this drone. It’s a very solidly built 18" frame on 6s 5100mAh batts which flew well when it was a “ZeroUAV HighOne” back in the day circa 2014.

So I’ve put in an Orange Cube Plus, done the notch filters. The ESC’s are 10 years old tech, so no bidirectional telemetry. Tried a QuikTune and AutoTune which were both disasters, so I’ve tuned the PIDs by hand, and had a play with a few other settings but I’m still not getting nice crisp movements like we might see on a DJI drone. There’s a small amount of overshoot wobble, and occasionally, especially in wind, it will do large oscillations, as seen towards the end of the video. So I’d really like to clean it up and make it fly well. I’m primarily wanting to fly in loiter or altHold mode, and this flight was done in Loiter.

Would love to get a bit of guidance as to where to focus my attention for next flight tests based on the video, logs and params attached here.

Thanks

Params:
MatDrone_1.19-windy.param (19.5 KB)

Hardware report:
Hardware Report Log-041.pdf (222.3 KB)

Logs:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b0wz9g1ivdiaqxt9nwnn3/00000041.BIN?rlkey=ps0lvpfc7uqpqrikb0tsiqmwn&dl=0

2

Nice, now that it kind of works, start again from the beginning, quick tune and autotune will work a lot better this time.

This time do it correctly using ArduPilot Methodic Configurator software.

1 Like
3

One of the 1st things you look at when manually tuning is Output oscillation and you cannot advance w/o addressing it. And this craft has massive output oscillation.

RCout
RCout3342×1031 404 KB

I would suggest you take @amilcarlucas advice and start over with The Configurator.

4

Thank you.
I will do this over the holiday break and post results here.
Merry Christmas