During my projects over the span of 4 years I had a love & hate relationship with the GPSs. I used them a lot but had to deal with all kinds of weird reactions from drifting to almost crashing the craft with wild swings, etc… Also, they are not very accurate and not very suitable for the purpose of my current projects, which requires precision. So, I am working on implementing alternative position hold systems.
One of these is optical flow sensor. I had this adns3080 sensor for more than a year and al last I had a chance to test it. One of the reasons that I found courage to test is that TriPhan doesn’t tilt. So, “hopefully” I don’t need to deal with the calculations required to adjust for the tilt angle, etc…
I am NOT conducting this with the APM board which the sensor is built for, but an Arduino board that talks to the flight controller. So, I setup my arduino nano and the code to do what I need it to do. It took me a significant amount of time to make everything work together. Below is the video of the very first test and it turned out to be way better than I expected from a first test. This is a VERY good sign. We had a little bit of drift at some parts but overall, the unit was hammered where it was on all X, Y, Z axis (BARO for Z). I even tried to push it with my hand, it wouldn’t move
Now it’s time for further tuning and higher altitude tests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu4p_m_m-N8