Calibration for every flight?

EyeWingsuit · Dec 31, 2015

Usually, I'm flying in very different areas, so I calibrate prior to each flight.
Yesterday I ran into a problem I haven't seen. Takeoff locations were less than 1000 yards apart from each other.

First flight, no problems

Second flight, the leg(s) are visible almost entirely through the shots.

Is calibration, or lack thereoff the problem here? Or something else? Unfortunately, I lost my light and didn't have time to calibrate and re-launch.

Thanks for any help.

pyrate · Dec 31, 2015

You may be over calibrating
I stopped doing calibrations unless solo asks me to

EyeWingsuit · Dec 31, 2015

I can certainly accept this premise, yet why out of 45 flights has this particular one had legs in the image? It's one of the very, very few that I didn't calibrate prior to each flight. *most* of my flight areas are at minimum, 10 miles apart (many are thousands of miles) and altitude variances of 200MSL to 7500MSL, hence the constant calibrations.

pyrate · Dec 31, 2015

erikgraham · Dec 31, 2015

I've flown from Iceland to Florida to northern Vermont and not done a calibration between flights. The key calibration is the compass and the Solo does that for you in flight. So if I had to guess it looks to me to be more of a one-off gimbal problem. Coincidence that it happened to be a flight where you didn't calibrate.

How about trying a series of test flights without calibration. I think you'll find you don't need to do it, unless the external compass gets "frazzled" by a magnet (for example moving a magnetized screw driver to close to the compass).

Eye in the Sky · Jan 5, 2016

I have been finding that solo has been asking to calibrate quite often if I have been carrying the quad nose down in the backpack I have set up for touring around/hiking etc. almost immediately after switching from the hard case I was using before, so maybe a little extra rattling around? As for the leg, I occasionally get it the same one in shots but mostly because of my own fault flying aggressively.

erikgraham · Jan 6, 2016

Eye in the Sky said:
I have been finding that solo has been asking to calibrate quite often if I have been carrying the quad nose down in the backpack I have set up for touring around/hiking etc. almost immediately after switching from the hard case I was using before, so maybe a little extra rattling around? As for the leg, I occasionally get it the same one in shots but mostly because of my own fault flying aggressively.

Careful. It sounds like you might have an IMU going bad. I would send some logs to 3DR to have them look and ask them to check for irregularities in the internal IMU inside the Pixhawk.