We tried to fly the same set of waypoints 8 times. Twice it worked perfectly. (15050804.GPX) Once it flew to the first waypoint and stayed there while continuing to rise at a constant rate. (13050806.GPX) Five times it flew to the first way point and then on to the second waypoint, but failing to keep the proper altitude and instead rising at a constant rate. Upon reaching the second waypoint it would stay there and continue to rise. (13050803.GPX) The firmware version was 90g. I want to get some extra eyes on this. Maybe there was something the pilot was doing to cause the misbehavior. I am hoping it's a pilot error and not bug in the firmware.
Can you post a screen capture of the waypoints programmed in MK Tool, please William. The GPX file doesn't contain details of how the Waypoints were programmed -- just details of the flight path. Not too many folks on the forum use Waypoint flying as far as I know -- largely because of an innate distrust of that much automation, plus the vagaries of GPS when the solar activity is high. These flights were on May 8, and I don't have historical data for the Kp Index to hand -- the Kp Index is the index of solar flare activity and its impact on Earth and thus a measure of the reliability of the GPS signals. Andy.
Thanks, Gary. Looks like Kp is nominal, so it's unlikely that the GPS satellites themselves were the cause... Andy.
Hello William and all the CS8 experts. I experienced the same problem in April with my CS8 with the firmware version 88n. The upgrade is scheduled but I hoped that the new firmware 90g would have solved the problem. After the waypoint 1 reached or 'around' the CS8 did not go to the waypoint 2. There was some wind but not very strong. At the beginning I thought that the wind prevented the CS8 to reach exactly the WP1, but I'm not so sure of that. I changed the extension of .wpl file to a .txt if you want to check the programmed flight. One hour later we used the same programmed flight and everything went fine. Since this day, we tried others programmed flights and everything worked fine. But, we are interested to know what happened. Did we do the same 'pilot errors' than William or is it a bug somewhere ? Henri
Here is the waypoint file. I had to add ".txt" to the file to be able to upload it. You will have to remove the ".txt" if you want to load it into MKTool. However, it is a text file so you can just read it in a text editor if you want. You can tell it's not a sensor error as the correct location of the craft is stored in the GPx file. A sudden error in the GPS reading would show up as a big position change in the GPX file. The craft was supposed to fly at an altitude of 70 meters, but you can see that it flies right through that altitude without even pausing.
I had a similar problem at first but it turned out that the speed of the waypoints was too slow. I turned up the speed and it started working fine. Never had a problem since. I don't use it much anymore, never since I have a seperate camera operator.
I don't think you got to your first waypoint. Your first waypoint is at 60 meters altitude and it only got to 31 meters altitude. It was programed to go up at half a meter per second which it looks like it was doing. So that looks OK. However, it also looks like it wasn't flying in the right direction. The navi controller thinks that it's target is to the North East, but it's course is to the South East. In this list, the first number is the course direction and second number is the direction it needed to go in order to reach the target (I think). 101 77 101 132 103 122 105 104 107 96 110 93 114 70 114 59 115 53 115 49 115 45 115 46 115 46 115 48 115 52 115 55 115 57 115 60 115 62 115 58 115 56 115 54 115 50 115 48 116 43 116 44 116 45 116 44 116 42 116 42 116 43 116 45 116 44 116 46 115 42 112 41 109 39 109 40 108 38 107 32 107 29 107 27 107 27 108 28 110 31 110 33 110 33 110 32 110 32 110 30 110 30
I has a similar problem with come home once. I flipped on come home and once it got to the home position it just started to go straight up. It was really high before I finally decided that something was wrong.
William: As far as the waypoint issue, this sounds like something you might want to post on the mikrokopter.de forum -- it feels more like a firmware bug. As for the Come Home "to the stratosphere" -- did you happen to have a GPX file for that you could post? Andy.
Ive had similar probelms with m waypoint flying, once every once in a while when the cs8 reaches the waypoint it just climbs and climbs and climbs and it doesnt seem to stop. i figured it was just a bug and maybe next FW update will fix it.
Here you go. This was my first attempt to fly with waypoint control. I had thought that the way point program would be stored on the micro SD card, and so I programmed it in my house unpowered it and took it outside and powered it up again. Of course it lost it's program as the program is stored in the microcontrollers RAM. So instead of the running the program it only did a come home. But I thought the program was running. The first part would have been for the flyer to fly up to 30 meters and and it was going up so I just let it. Eventually, I figured out that something was going wrong. In this flight I didn't have altitude control on. Later I decided that this might be the reason that it went up. In a later waypoint test the copter failed to point the camera at a point of interest. It flew the waypoints but didn't point the camera. It turned out that this happened because carefree control wasn't turned on. I decided that the theory of operation for waypoint flying was for the flyer to control it's coordinates it needed position hold on, for it to control it's altitude it needed altitude control on, and for it to control it's yaw it needed carefree control on. And so I figured that the reason why it flew up way past it's come home altitude was because I didn't have altitude control on and so it didn't control for it's altitude. I'm not so sure now. Altitude control was on for the all the waypoint flights that it flew up on. Maybe it was just misbehaving in the same manner.
I figured out what was going on here. When flying under waypoint control the CS8 is still paying attention to inputs from the remote control. And so if the throttle is above the neutral set point then the craft will go up even though the waypoint program says it should fly level. It's too easy to tap the throttle and not realize that you have sent the craft off course until it sticks at a waypoint. However, I suppose the thinking is that it insures that the state of the transmitter is in sync with the state of the craft so that there aren't any surprises when the program ends. You could imagine a case where the CS8 falls out of the sky as you turn off the CH switch because the throttle got bumped to zero while the program was running and no one noticed. On the other, there are better ways to handle this. Anyway, the takeaway is to steady the craft before you run the waypoint program and then don't touch the controls while the program is in effect.
Or you can change the settings to use the center point (127) to control AH and use the springs on the throttle so that it stays in the center position naturally. I think the Graupner TX's are the only radios that have centering springs on the throttle. Some folks like this setup, others don't. With the new Altitude ACC circuit I like the center spring way even more. Finding that I am flying AH more since it so solid.