Here's what a close encounter with the ground looks like!

David Weston · Jul 17, 2015

Was 2nd test flight with Tower. 1st was perfect. Really impressed. Bird flew at 25% performance, nice,n' easy like. 2nd flight got the "slider bar" to arm. Was at about 20' expecting the same routine, slider to the right and "WHOOSH", max throttle toward 1st WP. Altitude loss was due to extremely high angle of attack. All's well that end's well in this case. This was NOT a SOLO issue! Operator should have been flying MUCH higher!

https://vimeo.com/133751646

RichWest · Jul 17, 2015

The word pucker comes to mind.....

DodgeP · Jul 17, 2015

You would have hit the ground, Solo would have flipped over and played dead until you replaced the propellers.. lol..

1013D · Jul 17, 2015

why did it go so fast....was it setup differently in tower? I have yet to play with tower, but real close to trying it.

I need to find a good safe open place to test it out.

ChrisM101 · Jul 17, 2015

... and you see this as a problem on your part? should it not be able to maintain altitude ?

David Weston · Jul 17, 2015

At the moment I will say yes. Even my little quad does exactly the same thing when I am in expert mode. I just wasn't expecting a max power start and when in test mode and fooling around with something I know absolutely, well, then anyway, nothing I shouldn't have been flying at 20'. I have to admit, watching Solo go from WP 1, WP2, 3,4,5,6,7,8 and go into loiter, it made me smile thinking of the possibilities. As a side I had Tower running on a Tab s and Solo running on an Air Pad 2. When the mission started I just picked up my Air Pad and watched the video as SOLO flew hands off and then stopped when finished. I am impressed. I think a lot of owners will be also. Jus sayin'

rrmccabe · Jul 17, 2015

My thought is when flying in GPS mode it should maintain altitude period. Flying manual to acro could be argued.

This is either a fault of Tower or its integration with Solo. Flying at up to 33mph should not have issues.

Also David, did you have a ROI set? If not why was it dog tracking?

GoodnNuff · Jul 17, 2015

ChrisM101 said:
... and you see this as a problem on your part? should it not be able to maintain altitude ?

Physics. Steep angle required for fast acceleration also will point you towards the ground. Need to add lift to compensate. Same with fixed wings when turning with your ailerons.
In the early days of the Phantom 1, many of us were slamming into the ground or submerging ourselves in water because we didn't know any better.

David Weston · Jul 17, 2015

Rich, sorry but I don't know what ROI is as it pertains to these machines. As soon as I saw Solo take that steep angle of attack I knew I was in trouble. As I said earlier, same thing with my practice machine when in expert mode and I "floor it", but Im ready for it then. I hit Pause immediately (think I left an imprint on the button) and as soon as the brakes came on was wiggling sticks trying to regain control. If you note in the video as soon as it slowed I immediately gained altitude with a shaky hand. It flew dead on every flight, when it got squirly, that was me Im pretty sure. And you were right, hit Pause and Tower terminates. I believe that Solo still continues mission though

rrmccabe · Jul 17, 2015

Well I agree that excess speed will lower altitude. However in FLY/GPS mode at less than 33 mph it should maintains altitude fine. As you know you can go out and push the stick forward and can fly 1000s of feet and maintain near perfect altitude. There is no reason that Tower should act any different. If it does its a flaw.

ROI rotates the bird towards your "region of interest" and keeps flying your point A to B line. I was just asking if you had a ROI point set.

It appears to me that the aircraft was flying in the direction of yellow and the camera was looking towards blue. Course it happened so fast that it might just have been in the rotating process.

And yes the mission will continue after tower crashes because the mission has been loaded to the flight computer on the Solo.

You might want to add a few extra way points and change them to speed. Maybe 6 1/2 feet per second to slow down the Solo. You would enjoy the video much more

There are issues with tower. I am going to post this in the mission thread but will share here. I got this last night after asking about speed issues.

I've actually just found a bug in our mission library that may be related. If a "Do" command (like do-change-speed, do-set-roi, etc) is the very first command in a mission, it may be run again and again after the vehicle passes a waypoint.

Most missions start with a take-off command (which is not a do command) so this may be why the bug has persisted for so long.

I expect we will fix this for AC3.3.