Manual Throttle pulsing like bad alt hold.

[Max]

You shorted two of your battery cells together. If you're lucky the tiny pin acted as a fuse quick enough to save your pack. Please google how a balance plug is wired. You only need to use ground and ONE cell tap, depending on the voltage needed. To measure individual cell voltage you measure between pairs of taps. Never try to do both at the same time!

-Max

[importon]

Ok. That worked without catching on fire.
Unfortunately the flight characteristics seem to be the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WBbkdH3YxM
Do you think it's even worth it to install those new recoms? I'm a little weary of being able to de-solder the old ones.

[importon]

Well, I went and installed those new recoms. Will do outdoor flight first thing in the morning. Stay tuned and thanks again for all the invaluable help!

[importon]

Ok. After about 20 mins of flight time and 3 sets of lipos drained. I've got what looks to be a stable 16lb octo with plenty of power to spare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9crGgGHVqg check out the video of the last flight!
Again, a huge thank you to eveyone who took the time to help me. This is a great community. I would have been dead in the water without you guys.
I ended up lowering a lot of values by a significant amount. Have a look. Am I in danger of being too low on any of these values? What do you think? The low values seemed to snuff out any remaining osculations.
The throttle still is a bit jumpy, but I can definitely learn to fly like this I think.

One thing which is not quite there yet is gps. Gps hold was working very nicely for not having done any tuning, but moving the copter with pitch and roll was very awkward and clumsy. When I'd give it input, the copter would almost lunge in the direction, then stop every few feet abruptly and swing like a pendulum back and forth and then begin to lung in that direction again. Any advice for me to help fix that? (the video above is manual mode only)

Also, is there a way to set a flight mode that is altitude hold only without gps hold? kind of like attitude mode on dji?
I suppose I could alway unplug my gps but I would love to just have a switch. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[aBUGSworstnightmare]

[importon]

Thanks for your feedback.
That last video was flown in manual mode only. Sorry about the confusion. I was flying like that to check my pid settings for oscillations and responsiveness.

The gps behavior I'm referring to was in another flight. My buddy was filming with his phone so I will see if I can get that clip as well to upload.

I'm not really planning on using gps all that much but it would be nice to have in case of emergency.
I'm assuming that while you are flying in gps mode you are not really "flying" and are more just giving it instructions to "go to this new spot" when you give stick input rather than to pitch and roll. Is this correct?

Do you know if there is a way to fly with altitude hold only even if you have GPS lock? I can't find any info about this in the wikki.

[LPR]

Yes, Position Altitude Hold is like moving a waypoint and the multicopter will follow. It works very well at holding position and altitude. Being able to let go of controls makes flying a quad very easy. I think of manual control as a way to, in an emergency because of the lose of GPS, take control, not the other way around. If your planning on using a gimbal then using Pos/Alt Hold will make using the big x8 very easy if your using your octo a areas that have good GPS signals.

Larry

[importon]

Thanks for the info Larry. That makes sense. What would be most useful for me though would be to fly with altitude hold on but position hold off. Can you think of a way to do that other than disconnecting the gps antenna? Thanks!

[Max]

Yea unfortunately there's no Alt-only hold mode right now. I'd like one as well -- I find that I can generally do a smoother job holding the copter in place than even the best PH (no fault of the AQ, just the nature of GPS). But altitude is much harder to keep steady, partly because it's harder to tell when it is rising/sinking due to the viewing angle (unless you're flying close to eye level, of course).

Anyway, it's high on my personal "want" list and I know others have asked a few times... but I can't make any promises. One thing no one can ever agree on is how to control new features like this (though obviously no one wants to use up another RC channel). Frankly that can be the longest and most annoying part of implementing a change like this...

-Max

[chschmid]

Don't we have a very accurate alt hold with the baro. So if GPS is disconnected.... But no more RTH in emergency.