I received my APM2 yesterday; as expected the potential and complexity of this board is immense; it is both exciting and overwhelming; please share your questions and answers to move the prop forward for each other. Welcome to this thread.
I received my APM2 yesterday; as expected the potential and complexity of this board is immense; it is both exciting and overwhelming; please share your questions and answers to move the prop forward for each other. Welcome to this thread.
Last edited by RootCanalGuy; 2nd July 2012 at 06:23 PM.
Wow, you have to do a lot of reading. The connect button is to connect your pc with the apm. :-)
I am still waiting for the APM that I ordered but once it arrives I will be back in this thread and hoping to contribute in some way.
Are you as entrepeneuring with dental work as you are with this hobby?
Purveyor of the FPV secret sauce at ImmersionRC
Hey Root et al, glad this thread was started.
I in fact spent all day today trying to rebuild my tri from last week's crash.
It's very irritating because I'm having a hard time getting everything right again, plus the crash was stupid. For those of you (who like me) don't know - if you change battery voltages on the APM, you need to fly it in Stabilize mode for some amount of time (opinions vary from 15 seconds to 2 minutes) before you turn on Altitude Hold. It needs to "learn" the new voltage/throttle relationship. I didn't know this, flipped on Altitude Mode, had all motors shut down and crashed hard from about 20 meters. It pisses me off because everything was working so well before the crash, I was having a great time.
And this rebuild has had its issues too. The two big ones that I'm dealing with now have to do with pitch control and level control. For your entertainment, here's a video of my pitch problem:
View this video on Vimeo
The weird thing here is that you can see when I push up on the pitch stick (green line) the front two motors speed up (red and blue lines). Pull down on the stick and the back motor (orange line) goes up.
I can of course work around this by flipping the Reverse switch in the Transmitter config, but I'm not sure what else that might impact. I'm sure I'm doing something simple wrong, but can't figure it out. And yes, I went through the full transmitter calibration.
The second problem I'm having is that to fly it level, I've got to keep my right control stick almost all the way down and to the left. Which then makes it difficult to fly to the left or backwards! I suspect I have a bad ESC or motor on the right, my next step is to replace them. I've already done the ESC calibration twice and that didn't help. Sigh. That's another hour or so. Maybe I'll try replacing the motor first.
Oh well, sorry for all the whining. I was just hoping to spend a Saturday having fun flying, not soldering. Glad we've got our own little home here!
I love you too buddy !Originally Posted by ssassen
Are you as entrepeneuring with dental work as you are with this hobby?
(and the answer is YES)
Rol@nd,
I did read the material several times, but as I said in the introduction, it is overwhelming, which means I can't take it all in and need help; so, if you really want to help, here is my situation:
I downloaded the Mission planner; installed the software; connected the board to the PC using the provided USB cable; then the instruction read "Do not click 'Connect' yet ! You must load the correct firmware for your vehicle" , so I chose Tricopter .... at this point it seemed to load firmware to my FC; all along never got error messages, only congratulatory ones....he he...so far so good....however, the manual tells me when NOT to use software "connect" button, but things seemed connected and occurring without hitting it and nothing happened after pressing it.
Anyways, if you want to hang around any help thread, prepare yourself for dumb mistakes and questions.
Last edited by RootCanalGuy; 2nd July 2012 at 02:54 PM.
Ant my man,
If it wasn't for you I would still be monkeying with the KK board.
Have a safe trip back,
Root
what whining ? are you kidding. I practically had to send you an engraved invitation to come here; we need you brother; I wish I knew how to help you, at this time I know nothing; we'll have to wait for the heavy weights to come to bat for us; speaking of heavy weights Sibianul should weight in soon...that's one generous boy who'll help a brother in need; for now thanx XtraMetric (pronounced right?), my note to self = do not change voltage (cells numbers) = one less crash for me;
thanx for the heads up on battery changes...this is GOLD right here, worth the thread already !
You should be fine flipping the pitch reverse in either the transmitter itself or in the controller calibration, and everything will be fine. I'm surprised that stabilize mode is taking such a crazy amount of stick to stay level, hopefully it's just an ESC or motor issue, because the alternative may be accelerometer damage.
Have you erased/reset the APM2 and re-loaded 2.6 from scratch? You mentioned you did the transmiter calibration, I assume you also did the initial Level calibration too? If you've done this, when connected to MP, you should be able to click the 'status' tab in the lower-left window and look at the interpreted accel values, and make sure the readings are correct as you move it around with your hand.
You can also do a field re-level by holding the left stick down and to the left for about 12 seconds; you'll see the red/blue lights blink in a different pattern once the leveling has triggered.
I'm kinda taking shots in the dark, you probably know most of this stuff already, but I figured I'd at least mention it for others who are getting their APM's soon.
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