Several problems with Navio2 copter

Navio / Edge Hardware
1

I spent a not so successful morning out on the field trying to get my copter to fly.
With the latest emlid raspbian image, I used apt-get update/upgrade to get the latest compass fixes. No joy, no second compass present.
Downloaded the latest apm.deb with wget and now it has a second compass.
2nd compass set to external and roll 180°, all goes well.
Heading out to the field, powering up the copter, GNSS fix with 15sats, great!
Wait a moment, the compass is off 180° now, what´s that?
Setting the 2nd compass to pitch 180°, recalibrating, everything fine with the compass again.
AHRS_Orientation is set to 4 (yaw 180°) for my copter and as far as I know, the external compass must be set relative to the AHRS_Orientation, but in this case I had to add the AHRS_Orientation to the compass orientation myself. I hope it is clear what I am trying to say.
Another reboot, compass is working and… no GNSS fix… :frowning:
Tinkering with the GNSS settings, I was able to get a more or less stable fix with 12 sats max, but the copter icon was moving around the map all the time. My Mini Skyhunter with a pixfalcon and a M8N GNSS has a fix with up to 19 sats in the same spot.
First flight, stabilize mode worked, but was undertuned and sluggish. Tried althold mode and it was constantly rising and falling. I changed throttle hover to 0.46 because the copter was hovering with a little less than half throttle. (This method worked with my overpowered pixhawk copter).
Althold was suddenly really agressive, but not able to hold an altitude.
I thought I had done something wrong, had a look at the arducopter wiki and I am pretty sure, they describe the procedure for throttle hover setting the wrong way around. Have a look if you like:

http://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/basic-tuning.html#throttle-tuning

Next I wanted to tune the PIDs to get it to fly more stable, but all the boxes were greyed out in mission planner (except for a few I never really needed before) and even the slider for roll/pitch sensitivity was not present.
I just had enough then and went home.

2

That is strange. Navio 2 has to compasses onboard. And we need to set the second one as external only for now. I know it’s confusing, but there’s no way around it just yet. It’ll be fixed in the next release but for now please pay attention!

The onboard logs would help us!

3

I will upload them as soon as I am back home.

4

Here is the dataflash log from yesterdays flight, would the parameter file be helping, too?

5.BIN.nav (2.0 MB)

5

Sebastian, thanks for the report.
Seems like you’re always “lucky” to experience most of the issues :sweat:

We will check the logs.
And we’ll add more info about the compass in the docs.
Regarding the GNSS receiver not having fix - if that happens try to change the antenna and see if it has immediate effect. Maybe the antenna cable is starting to tear.

6

I had issues with the PID values being grayed out with ArduCopter 3.4-dev. I was able to set them thru the full parameters list under ATC.

7

The antenna has always been in the same place and the cable has never been moved or stressed, except from the airflow.

8

Thank you, I did not think of this way back then.