MultiWii

Yes. That is exactly what I'm saying. A smaller quad with the same battery as a larger quad will need a lower C-rating.

@kilby. Could you explain why smaller quads need higher discharge rates? I can't imagine that is true. Are you perhaps confused with capacity? Smaller batteries will need higher C values to supply the same current.

No I don't think you should buy a 4S. I still suspect it is a combination with an aggressive I value and vibrations/imbalance. Maybe your motors don't point up perfectly or one of your ESCs is a bit crappy. (I noticed a significant clock drift between my ESCs)

For fun I just simulated a heavily vibrating aircraft. I was able to tune it back to a decent flight by drastically lowering the P-gain (and also I and D accordingly)

I had the very same problem. For me the I value of the PID controller was set to aggressively. Setting that to 0 solved all my problems.

First of: I'm not awfully familiar with the MW code, but I _think_ I do understand PID controllers. That said, this situation seems strange to me. When your derivative term comes close[1] to your proportional term it can play a larger (than P) role in the PID output. Thus causing your craft to rotat...

I could imagine your ESCs are bailing out? It requires so much current to spin up your engines the ESC will conclude the motor is stuck and fail saves are kicking in. To prevent melting your motors. If you can't disable that feature on your ESCs, maybe you could try smaller props. (just pulling a su...

I guess you are on Windows. You will have to install the Python interpreter. Make sure you get the SciPy and pygame packages as well. When you did that you can start quadsim.py

https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/
http://www.pygame.org/download.shtml
http://www.scipy.org/install.html

I don't think TAC is on by default. Though I'm interested. The other day I plummeted on the ground, full speed, perfectly horizontal but upside down.
TAC and horizontal where on and I was trying my first flip. I guess I now understand what went wrong and why I was unable to get it straight again.

Among fixing the drag model I also included a pidcontroller run time. If you want, you can study the effects of a slow processor on the stability of the aircraft and the required PID values. Or even vary the speed the motors can react.

I reviewed your patch by looking at the diff. (I don't have indepth knowledge of the MW code). Some comments: - Your patch is a bit polluted with whitespace changes - For some reason you expose go_disarm() in MultiWii.h(I'd say put a forward declaration in MultiWii.cpp if needed.) - I consider it ba...

I was planning to play around with some PID algorithms. But I could not find a simulator fitting my needs. Thus I created one. It is not finished, but it is in a state that it might be useful for someone else. I'm not a physicist and primarily relying on the physics I learned long ago in high school...

Showing my first quad. First in a sense I never build one and never flown one. It continues to be a great learning experience. It is actually the 3th iteration of the same craft. 1st never flew, 2nd flew but was very fragile was very nervous. 3th has a beefy frame and flies like a dream. It will kee...

I meant the serial port on your FC board. Likely where you hook up the ftdi cable. Any bend pins? Bottom of the FC maybe touching something metal?

so:
- it runs (but probably bad PID values)
- doesn't respond to serial communications.
- Can't be programmed.

Have you hooked anything else on the serial port? Could there be a short around there?

Implementing that would be trivial however I have no idea how the radio is configured when it leaves the factory... I could provide a "sane configuration for multirotors" file (which would very much look like your current settings) for one to upload.

In all honesty, I have forgotten what the SWA, SWB, VRA values are for. I will seen if I can locate some documentation. Oh, I remember now, I am using the Switches to activate ch5 and 6 Yes I can see that in your table with mix settings. So it could be that the switch functions are just never set? ...

Thanks! I will document the python-serial dependency. That the checksum error message actually showed up in the gui is not on purpose. Also it is perfectly possible to get some errors when the program starts as it might not be in sync with the radio yet. I just removed the checksum error message. Al...

copterrichie wrote:Thank you, very valuable. I have a similar T6 transmitter sitting, will give this a test.

Great! When you do, please let me know what you think.

There you have it. You can now natively program your Hobby King remote control from Linux. Plus it is fully open sourced. "Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, Trash it, change it, mail - upgrade it"

Features: Auto trim, save/restore, context help

I spend some extra time implementing a small tool to use this protocol. In the same github repository. I tested it on Linux. I expect the backup/restore functionality to work in Windows as well. When started without -u or -d switches it will enter the (still very limited) interactive GUI mode (which...

Taking a stab at this, since I have no GPS experience. I guess either MW2.2 or the config generator you are using has no support for that protocol yet. But if you look at the config.h from trunk or 2.3 you will find "#define UBLOX" in the GPS section along with all other relevant settings.

This is not strictly MW related but I suspect of interest. I was quite surprised that although there is at least one 3th party application to configure the HK-T6Av2 remote I could not found a protocol description on the net. Also I want to be able to use it in Linux without installing Mono. Therefor...

LIFT OFF! So It appears my initial observations where the biggest hint. I was putting the PID control tuning forward for the time all the problems where solved. But the MultiWii default PIDs where to aggressive for my craft. Setting the I and D terms to 0 suddenly gave me all the lift I need to hov...

I just reprogrammed all settings in the ESCs to make sure they are the same. However to no avail. I did notice during this process (where I hooked up the ESCs directly to the RX that one of these motor/prop combo's have more than enough power to lift the entire craft. Still hardly any lift.

Good to hear you have a similar setup working. I'm also less confident my battery is the problem after I did some tests yesterday. I got a handfull of flight of a few seconds, but it was unable to maintain altitude. I'm starting to suspect my ESC's are calibrated but configured incorrectly. I will d...

It says on the motor: A2212/13T 1000KV. Google's guess is that the brand is RCTimer. The total weight is 1166g. ESCs are calibrated. There are vibrations during initial spin up, but once armed and idling I'd say there are no excessive vibrations (judging with my limited experience) I have used Ecalc...

I'm pretty sure I've already done it, but I calibrated the ACC anyway. This helped me arming the engines! Still I get hardly any flying time. As the battery(3S) goes below 11.4 Volt I don't get lift anymore. I'm thinking I should buy a 4S LiPo instead? So I could use the full battery capacity. Does ...

It got worse. I cleared the EEPROM and managed to set my bluetooth module to 115k2. For some reason I got of the ground for a bit. But it did not last long. Then I tried the alternative pid controller (#define PID_CONTROLLER 2) to see if that would make a difference. But now the board refuses to arm...

Thanks waltr. This behavior is in acro mode as well. Your link suggests clearing the EEPROM. Can try that tonight.

4-rotor / 12x3.8 / 1000KV / Hobbywing 30A ESCs / 3700 mAh 3S 35C / Crius AIO pro (v2?) / MW 2.3 My very first build and having a successful first flight 2 days ago. Since then however I've been getting progressively less lift. Now it won't even come of the ground, even with full charge. I have no id...