Uncontrolled circling in loiter and crash on auto mission

I am running AC 3.1 and havent had any issues in Stabilize, Alt Hold, Land, or Drift. however when i switch into loiter the circles keep getting bigger and bigger (from 50 feet to almost 250 feet) but my issues dont stop there. In auto mode the copter goes crazy. It will fly to the first waypoing but after that it adds power and induces a 30 degree dive into the ground and it doesnt stop even if the mode is switched to stabilize. NOw this is not the first time this has happended to me the first was on my Hex… which is why i now have a quad. Any help would be great.

My setup is:
APM 2.5
AC 3.1
Quad with 4 30A ESC
3DR power dongle

[color=#008000]Which GPS do you use?

About the circling, that’s called toiletbowling and usually caused by compass problems. Refer to the documentation on where and how to install the APM or external compass and how to calibrate the magnetometers.

About the other problems, please refer to the instructions on how to use this forums and add the missing information, especially, a dataflash log file.

Finally, your questions have probably nothing to do with “Flight modes, radio configuration and failsafes”, so please post your support requests to the approriate subforums in future! I also edited your topic title to be more descriptive for your benefit.[/color]

[mf]Copter/Flight Modes, Radio Configuration, and Failsafes[/mf]

Thanks for your advice. The APM is unresponsive so I don’t have to logs to share, otherwise I would have posted them. Any thoughts on reviving a unresponsive APM 2.5?

The APM 2.5 is from 3DR
the GPS is MediaTek
My radio is a Spektrum 6xi
I don’t have an external compass however I always calibrate the internal compass using the wizzard

Did you do compassmot? If so, with which results?

I just got the APM responding last night. I will do a compassmot tonight and post the results.

The point is that you should do the compassmot as part of the setup procedure and definitely before you rely on loiter or any other auto mode…

The “toilet bowling effect” is synonymous of strong magnetism induced by the motors that send adrift the compass.
Things to do to solve it:

  1. don’t connect to the board all the unused wire from the ESC servo plug connector, connect to your board only the pwm signal
  2. calibrate your compass in an open space, in the middle of a lawn is the best thing
  3. twists all the cable (esc, power, telemetry, gps, etc.)
  4. avoid using metal spacer close to the board, aluminum or plastic are fine
  5. power cables must be as short as possible, in all cases, and the LiPo quite distant from the board
  6. after a good manual compass calibration use in Terminal the “compassmot” function, if the rate of drift is not over 20% your Loiter will be nice like on my videos

Sew during Loiter see that the quad starts to make this issue don’t engage any automatism like RTL, the quad should be brought under control in Stabilize or Acro, also Alt-Hold is fine.
Let me know if you can solve, if hardware and software are configured correctly Loiter will be perfect.

Marco

Hi , I am using APM 3.2 LATEST and APM 2.6 BOARD , on the you tube video , loiter is not circling , but my quadcopter is circling on loiter mode, is there any settings to stay in one position without circling like in youtube video in loiter mode.
youtube.com/watch?v=iGA6D2GBFIc

cheers
DAVID

[quote=“davidkhan”]Hi , I am using APM 3.2 LATEST and APM 2.6 BOARD , on the you tube video , loiter is not circling , but my quadcopter is circling on loiter mode, is there any settings to stay in one position without circling like in youtube video in loiter mode.
youtube.com/watch?v=iGA6D2GBFIc

cheers
DAVID[/quote]

[quote=“StefanG”]Which GPS do you use?

About the circling, that’s called toiletbowling and usually caused by compass problems. Refer to the documentation on where and how to install the APM or external compass and how to calibrate the magnetometers.[/quote]

[quote=“marco3dr”]The “toilet bowling effect” is synonymous of strong magnetism induced by the motors that send adrift the compass.
Things to do to solve it:

  1. don’t connect to the board all the unused wire from the ESC servo plug connector, connect to your board only the pwm signal
  2. calibrate your compass in an open space, in the middle of a lawn is the best thing
  3. twists all the cable (esc, power, telemetry, gps, etc.)
  4. avoid using metal spacer close to the board, aluminum or plastic are fine
  5. power cables must be as short as possible, in all cases, and the LiPo quite distant from the board
  6. after a good manual compass calibration use in Terminal the “compassmot” function, if the rate of drift is not over 20% your Loiter will be nice like on my videos
    [/quote]