Throttle Cuts Out

[bstott]

I've had my flie flying and then it developed a problem with the throttle wildly changing down and up from what it is set at. I am using a wireless PDP PS3 I do not have a wired PS3 device. I am not a gamer.

With a fully charged battery and no indication of packets lost - The throttle will drop in value varying from the actual setting to half throttle to zero then come back up again.

I've upgraded, downgraded and upgraded again the firmware. I have changed the radio channels from low to high values. I've varied the bandwidth too. 250K-1M and 2M. I tried varying the slew. The same thing happens. I fly in Normal mode. I push the throttle the motors accelerate to the expected setting then in a few seconds the throttle will begin to variably fluctuate between the desired setting to zero without any user input.

See Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCgvTiiCU34

Reminder: I have changed the firmware. I've changed channels and bandwidths to eliminate conflict with WiFi and other radios. In the video I am not varying the throttle after I have set it to approximately 50%. The variation of throttle seen in the video is the event that prohibits flying.

What could be the cause?

[Surrender]

Maybe it has to do something with your controller because its changing over time.
Have you another controller to check that? Otherwise you can try it out with Droidmote (virtual joysticks on android) and see if it is working.

The controller could be damaged or is not working properly (i also had one, but a 5€ cheap one).

These cuts off to zero throttle are strange althought..
You have to check if it is the controller or not.

Greetings



Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[tobias]

Does it seem to be due to disconnects? I'm guessing you are holding the CF in your hand while doing the test. Have a look at the Crazyradio and see if you get many flashes from the red LED? That means there was a packet loss, which can happen from time to time, but shouldn't happen a lot.

[smokedasphalt]

throttle wildly changing down and up from what it is set at

With a fully charged battery and no indication of packets lost

The same thing happens to me when I use the cfclient on Arch Linux. I can fly the quad for a minute or so, then it starts to go haywire. The throttle changes automagically, the attitude indicator starts swinging around wildly as if the crazyflie is stuck in a storm, and then after a few seconds, packets are lost leading to the disconnection of the crazyflie.
Oddly, everything works great in Win 8.

[marcus]

Hi,

Are you running the latest version of the client from the repo? Are you holding the throttle perfectly still when this happens?

I'm wondering if this could be caused by this fix. Since we cannot detect when a joystick is disconnected using pygame this workaround was implemented. If no new events at all come in for 1 second then the joystick sub-system will be de-initialized and re-initialized to be able to see if any devices have been disconnected. If there's no changes the old device is opened again for reading. When we tried this using an original PS3 and Xbox360 controller on Linux we could not see any problems. Even if the we get no input for 1 second the re-initialization of the joystick sub-system will not affect the performance (from what we have seen).

But if you are not holding the analog stick perfectly still for 1 second the this should not affect at all.

[smokedasphalt]

Are you running the latest version of the client from the repo? Are you holding the throttle perfectly still when this happens?

Yes, I'm running the latest version of the client and firmware. And no, the weird behaviour seems to be randomly induced. As stated in my previous post, the crazyflie will just go berserk. Even if I hold it firmly in my hand while it is running, the attitude indicator will spin wildly and the cfclient stops responding to any commands from the joystick. It disconnects after 10-15 seconds of doing this. I think the problem is at my end since it only happens on Arch and not on Windows 8, and also there is no forum post regarding such behaviour. I'll post a video if anyone is interested.

[marcus]

Yeah, if you would like to post a video I would be interested in seeing how it behaves. It sounds a lot like there's dropped packages, but it could also be something else. When this happens do you get the feeling that it's just random or is it delayed? Is the red LED on the Crazyradio dongle blinking?