Hi all,
I've encountered one bizarre bug today with the latest "untested" firmware with the CD, or "Crazy Destroyer", in its name. When I started the drone, and was going to insert the USB while powered on for uploading the mission, the drone armed itself, disarmed, armed and cycled its landing gear erratically, and went also to the radio failsafe mode for few moments, dropping the radio connection. It did not spool up the motors from the idle or pose any serious hazard, but this is something that I still take very seriously. The PX4 logs show something that could be weird RC behavior, and the logs of ST16 seem to be missing for that moment.
I restarted the drone by removing and reinserting the battery three times, repeating the very same behavior - the drone armed as soon as the GPS fix was got, but stayed in the idle. No mission was uploaded at this point. The ST16 was powered on, not resetted between these three attempts. Then, after touching the ST16, double-clicking the battery icon for channels check, all these issues went away and I was not able to trigger this kind of behaviour again. I'll do more testing this weekend. After the last incident, when the drone was still armed, but this time with no propellers and I was able to handle it more freely, it reacted perfectly to the commands and tilting it. Something triggered the arming, the drone was not messed up, and I do not yet know why this happened.
However, in the /src/lib/st24.cpp, it can be seen that there is CRC checksum checking in place for the serial data received from the SR24 receiver, so the channel data is very likely not to be corrupted between the ST16's internal radio module and the Typhoon's MCU. But, what data is fed to this module by the ST16 is another question... Also, as this kind of behavior is not seen previously with the PX4, it is pretty safe to assume, that the PX4 is also OK. Also, if there is something seriously wrong with the Thunderbird fork, this kind of behavior would have been appeared previously during all the testing, as I was able to repeat this three consecutive times before touching the ST16. This is going to be a hard one for me to track down as there is a possibility that this is something erratic caused by the ST16, and some erratic ST16 behavior such as channels getting messed up is not uncommon even in this forum.
At this point I am assuming that the ST16 was doing something stupid, especially as ~six flights ago I replaced my left gimbal (throttle and rudder), and this is why I am going to keep the firmware image available still.
I'll get back to this and your other questions as soon as I have resolved this one or tested it enough to be confident enough that the issue was a misbehaving ST16...
Be careful.
