Help with Aerosky X350 with APM

[stony99]

I love my Phantom clone, the Aerosky X350. But now I am having problems.

It has the APM board in it with a GPS with a built in compass. I believe it is a 3D style.

I also have on my computer the APM Planner 2.

When I fly it, and use the circle mode on the controller, lately, it starts the circle, and after about 60% of the way around it starts drifting and then landing!

I used the reset using the APM 2 program. I thought that would re-set all the factory settings. It said it did! But still the same thing happens.

Other than the incomplete circle and landing, it seems to fly normally. The return to home works and so does the headless mode. Just the circle mode seems to be bad somehow.

I did re-calibrate using the APM 2 program. The Aerosky does not have a compass calibration procedure. The manual says it has an "automatic compass calibration", presumably when you start it up.

At start up, it will not let you start the motors until it has sufficient satellites.

Does anyone have any ideas where I start? What could make it do only 60% of a circle (30' diameter) and then wander off and land?

My Aerosky always held it's GPS position better than my DJI Phantom.

 

[RENOV8R]

OK it's been a loooong time since I've done anything APM but from what I remember, Circle Mode is a type of failsafe setting. Similar to Loiter but with no position hold. You'll have to do some more research but basically when you activate circle mode, it'll circle a point for a certain amount of time (I think 20 or 30 seconds is default) then land. My guess is that the time between activation and landing was set to a longer time and when you did a system reset, it went back to the default shorter time.

 

[stony99]

I got it figured out ... I did something really stupid. I had lost a prop nut, so I went to the hardware store and bought a metric STEEL acorn nut (luckily it was a right hand thread I needed) that looked like the original.

The spinning steel nut that happened to be at the same or close to the same height as the GPS/Compass unit was messing with the GPS and Compass. As soon as I switched it out for an aluminum nut, the problem went away!
I should have known better! Now my Aerosky is more stable and more accurate than my DJI Phantom.

 

[RENOV8R]

Wow, that's a first! Glad you got it figured out.