First Flight test today went... well not so good. First off I found an issue with the APM 2.5 where the pitch channel is basically inverted. If you move the stick up on your hand station to simulate pitch forward it increases the PWM frequency to between 1500 to 2000 milliseconds, and the radio calibration on the mission planner software for the APM shows this as correct. The problem lies in the Arducopter firmware. It registers 1500 down to 1000 as pitch down. This is the opposite of what the hand station defaults to. The solution was a minor rewrite of my code to account for this and reversing the channel in the hand station. Problem one solved.
Problem two. I did not have enough female to female extension jumpers to connect the ultrasonic's 4 wires to the Mega and I modified some female to male connectors. This was not making a complete connection with the Mega board. With the vibration that the Quad suffers in flight these connections became , well ... non connections. If the sensors lose connection I get no distance data and no override or control happens to slow an approach towards a wall and no auto back away. What does this mean, well for me it meant 3 broken props from 2 wall strikes while hovering 1 to 2 inches off of the ground. Problem 2 will need attention before the next flight.
Well that's the bad news, now for the good news. The quad avoided the wall in one direction perfectly. The servos are also working perfectly to keep the ultrasonic sensors horizontal to the ground. Once I get the hardware connection problems fixed we will try another flight test. If everything goes well, the quad will actually be ready for demonstration by this weekend.
I updated the link for the current code on my dropbox account.
Wall avoidance 103beta
Problem two. I did not have enough female to female extension jumpers to connect the ultrasonic's 4 wires to the Mega and I modified some female to male connectors. This was not making a complete connection with the Mega board. With the vibration that the Quad suffers in flight these connections became , well ... non connections. If the sensors lose connection I get no distance data and no override or control happens to slow an approach towards a wall and no auto back away. What does this mean, well for me it meant 3 broken props from 2 wall strikes while hovering 1 to 2 inches off of the ground. Problem 2 will need attention before the next flight.
Well that's the bad news, now for the good news. The quad avoided the wall in one direction perfectly. The servos are also working perfectly to keep the ultrasonic sensors horizontal to the ground. Once I get the hardware connection problems fixed we will try another flight test. If everything goes well, the quad will actually be ready for demonstration by this weekend.
I updated the link for the current code on my dropbox account.
Wall avoidance 103beta
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