OK, so this is a little off topic but I know there are plenty of smart & experienced folks (like @Pedals2Paddles )who haunt this forum who may be able to help.
I volunteer about 2 hours a week at the local high school to help three student teams prepare for the AMA UAS4STEM competition. This competition has the students build and fly a Pixhawk/APM powered quad, with a search/rescue themed competition (end of April). The hardware is sold to the teams as a kit, part substitutions are not allowed (for the most part).
This is my second year helping at this school. We are re-using the quads from last year, but we replaced the APMs with Pixhawk clones for this year. Last year's quads exhibited similar issues, and I was hoping the Pixhawks would allow us to diagnose and correct. These quads did fly well back when we first started flying them
The problem we are having on all three quads is a total lack of power. If we go and try and fly, the quads barely have enough power to hover a couple of feet in the air (in ground effect). When we control the motor speeds directly (like after an ESC calibration or in the motor test interface), the motor speeds seem much higher than when we operate the motors in any flight mode. I feel like the cause is buried in the ArduCopter firmware parameters.
My next step is to pull out my old RC plane tachometer, and verify my belief about the motor speeds being lower in flight than when testing the motors on the bench.
I've attached a copy of our current parameters list. Comments/thoughts welcome!
I volunteer about 2 hours a week at the local high school to help three student teams prepare for the AMA UAS4STEM competition. This competition has the students build and fly a Pixhawk/APM powered quad, with a search/rescue themed competition (end of April). The hardware is sold to the teams as a kit, part substitutions are not allowed (for the most part).
This is my second year helping at this school. We are re-using the quads from last year, but we replaced the APMs with Pixhawk clones for this year. Last year's quads exhibited similar issues, and I was hoping the Pixhawks would allow us to diagnose and correct. These quads did fly well back when we first started flying them
The problem we are having on all three quads is a total lack of power. If we go and try and fly, the quads barely have enough power to hover a couple of feet in the air (in ground effect). When we control the motor speeds directly (like after an ESC calibration or in the motor test interface), the motor speeds seem much higher than when we operate the motors in any flight mode. I feel like the cause is buried in the ArduCopter firmware parameters.
My next step is to pull out my old RC plane tachometer, and verify my belief about the motor speeds being lower in flight than when testing the motors on the bench.
I've attached a copy of our current parameters list. Comments/thoughts welcome!
