MultiWii

Hi NNagib, very sorry to hear about your crash. The cause may have been a faulty flight controller. I had a similar problem with the HK Red Board. Although my quad flew well, whenever I switched to a function involving BARO it shot off vertically and did not stop until I switched it off. I swapped t...

I tried to initiate a mission from rest (with the throttle closed) but the props just spun up to what I suppose was MINTHROTTLE (1100) and it just set there. I assume this is a safety feature to prevent an inadvertent take off by mistakenly moving a switch. If so, I think that this is the right appr...

Time for me to eat humble pie and restore the reputation of HobbyKing. The problem was that I had Serial 0 speed set as 115200. I have changed it to 57600 in the sketch and GUI and everything works now. I do not remember how I managed to change this or why I thought it was the correct value. I am ve...

I think I must have been unlucky with dud HobbyKing flight controllers. I would be tearing my hair out if I had any to spare! I shall get a genuine Crius AIO. Hope the ones advertised by the likes of Good Luck Buy are the real McCoy and not some other dodgy offering.

After my HobbyKing red board started refusing to connect to WinGUI I returned it to HobbyKing, got a refund and changed to their Crius All-in-One clone. This worked fine for a while but now it has the same problem. I have been using "MultiWii 2.3naviB7" with "WinGUI_2.3 pre10 for navi...

Thanks Pluschi. I had not noticed this jumper and I did not short it, but I had been able to program the board without difficulty until recently. It seemed to fly well except for an issue with the altitude control. Then for no obvious reason it just would not connect to my PC. It’s on the way back t...

I’ve given up on the HK red board. I couldn’t solve the problem with the altitude control and now it won’t even connect to the GUI or Arduino program. Keeps telling me I’m using the wrong port although I am not. Resetting doesn't help. I’m sending it back in the hope of a refund.

Hi NNagib, this sounds horribly like the trouble I was having with this board. I swapped it for a Hobby King Crius AIO look-alike using the same firmware and I don’t seem to have the same problem with that. I find it hard to believe that both your board and mine are faulty. I did notice that the z-a...

Thanks brewski. It's absolutely pouring with rain here after a (for us) hot dry spell. Looks as if I shall be grounded for a bit. DF

Hi brewski, thanks for the advice. I am using the onboard magnetometer and I have laid out the leads symmetrically and twisted each pair. The flight controller is 60 mm above the distribution board. I tested with a compass sitting on the FC and could not discern any deflection at normal current. I h...

Thanks for the advice chaps. Once I’d worked out that you had to lift the tab to remove the pins it was straight forward. I took the four pins out of the 5-pin plug, split it to get two 2-pin plugs and pushed the pins back in the appropriate holes. They hold well and it all works.

I could do with some help physically connecting the Ublox NEO-6M GPS module to the Crius AIO board. The Ublox has a 4-pin Molex the other end of which terminates in a 5-pin Molex. As I am powering the board from an ESC, I understand that I need to connect the Ublox Tx and Rx to Serial 2 Rx and Tx, b...

Thanks JH, just ordered one. DF

Hi brewski, I guess you’re right. Do you think the Hobby King Crius AIO look-alike would be up to scratch? I comes with all the connectors and I can get it from the UK warehouse.

Thanks brewski and Olaf. I cleared all 4k of the EEPROM and reloaded b7 but got the same result. Switching from (HORIZON) to (HORIZON+BARO) produced a vertical fly away. I’ve tried it with and without foam covering and got the same result. I had an Eagle Tree logger on board with its own altimeter. ...

Thanks for the advice Olaf. I erased the EEPROM with the Arduino example sketch “clear_eeprom“, which writes zero to 512 bytes. Should I change this to 4096 bytes ? On the Flight Tuning tab I have default PIDs and have enabled GPS filtering GPS forward prediction filtering Nav controls heading Turn ...

Oh dear, looks as if I’m not out of the wood yet. In my tests I disabled NAV_TAKEOVER_BARO and also IGNORE_THROTTLE. Looking at Bandi’s forum it appears that both of these take effect only in a mission or RTH. I only used two switches, one turning on just BARO and the other just GPS hold. They both ...

I’ve been using 2.2 satisfactorily with Hobby King MultiWii Pro and am now trying b7. When I switched from just ANGLE to just ANGLE + BARO the quad shot straight up fast and would have flown away if I had not switched back. This was “cured” by disabling NAV_TAKEOVER_BARO and IGNORE_THROTTLE but I ca...

PROBLEM SOLVED. After advice from majik I disabled "Takeover BARO Mode" which is enabled by default in b7. There was no fly away and the altitude was held quite well. Hard to judge the actual height but it seemed to stay within a meter most of the time with occasional larger excursions bef...

Just wonder if I should try modifying the firmware so that only the barometer is used in altitude hold. At the bottom of IMU.cpp in the section #if BARO, change the line vel = vel * 0.985f + baroVel * 0.015f; to just vel = baroVel; Sounds like the Saucer's Apprentice but it looks harmless and it sho...

My board is the red one sold by Hobby King as “MultiWii PRO Flight Controller w/MTK GPS Module” and it’s exactly as shown, with four separate sensors. The accelerometer is definitely a BMA180. I bought it last May although the date on the BMA180 is late 2012 so the board may have been around for a w...

That’s very interesting Mike. Clutching at straws, it could be that if the accelerometer was only reading 0.5G it would appear to be falling and so increase the throttle. I calibrate the accelerometer in the GUI Flight Deck. I don’t know how else to do it. In the Sensor Graph tab the scale is +/- 30...

I’ve done a simulation on the GUI and everything works as it should. When USB was connected the altitude read zero and stayed there. After 5 minutes I armed and the altimeter stayed zero. After another 5 minutes I raised the quad 2m and altimeter read 2m. I set the throttle to 50% and switched from ...

Had a flight this morning with HORIZON + MAG + POSHOLD. Without BARO there was no vertical flyaway. Horizontal position took a little while to stabilise, wandering around several metres, but then settled to within about a metre. Occasionally it would be pushed further off by a gust but it would sit ...

I tried out b7 today. It was rather too windy for my liking but the quad flew quite well on just HORIZON. I had 8 satellites so I tried HORIZON+BARO+MAG+POSHOLD and it held horizontal position within about 2m for a few seconds then shot upwards at some speed and I had to abort. Tried a few more time...

Thanks for all that advice brewski. I’ve installed b7 and the GUI and set the PIDs to default values and recalibrated the accelerometer and magnetometer . Sorry about the mix up with NMEA and UBLOX. I was using #define UBLOX with the Ublox. My frame is a Hobby King X580 and I’m using EMAX MT2216-850...

Those are the settings I used. I’ve no idea which revision I have, just the one that Hobby King sells. On the chip it says NEO-6M-0-001. Hobby King say it has an EEProm but the battery is just a MS621FE button cell. I’m new to multi rotors although I’ve been flying RC planes for donkeys’ years. Star...

Thanks brewski. I have tried a Ublox NEO-6M (in the same position and with #define NMEA and GPS_BAUD 38400) but it did not get any more satellites than with the MTK (one less typically). But perhaps the number of satellites isn’t the only thing that determines position accuracy. Everyone says the Ub...

Thanks for your help both of you. I was pointed by majik01 to the MultiWii forum on www.multiwii.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3989 and it seems to contain all the help you need about GPS navigation, although it’s a lot to wade through. It appears that you do need ANGLE, BARO and MAG for all nav...

I have a question about GPS navigation, specifically in MultiWii 2.3_navi_b5_baro_fix. I have set #define RTH_ALTITUDE, so the barometer is needed for RTH as well as the magnetometer. Do I need to set BARO and MAG as well as GPS HOME in RC Control Settings or does the firmware “know” to use the baro...