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Skidding turns

dkatz42

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Joined
Jan 15, 2018
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Location
Tesuque, NM
I got my MP yesterday and immediately went to go fly it. Although I knew better, I took the manuals at their word that the various calibrations weren't necessary. The fallacy of this quickly became obvious, as there was a lot of drifting and circling and various IMU and GPS alarms going off all the time.

So today I got up and did the IMU and compass calibrations and went back out, and it was like it was on rails. No drift, no alarms, hovering rock-solid. Very nice.

However, I then almost wrecked it after I got a bit frisky and started to push it a little bit. I've flown a P2V for some years, and one of the fun bits was how tightly it would turn when you crank in a bunch of yaw while moving forward quickly. But to my surprise (and that of a tree) the MP seems to skid through the turns. If I yaw while moving forward, it does turn, but much more slowly--it yaws immediately but the path it follows over the ground turns much more slowly than my P2V did; I managed to panic-stop before hitting anything.

I took a bit more time (while using more altitude) to play with this a bit more, and it just doesn't seem to turn nearly as tightly as my P2V did. Everything else is rock solid.

For those of you who have flown both, do you see the MP as being less maneuverable in this way? Or is there a setting in there somewhere that I missed? (I did read all of the manuals. Several times. <geek>)
 
This was normal, GPS mode. I'm not trying to do anything crazy. I'm just trying to find out if this is expected behavior or not--with full stabilization I would expect it to be tighter, and it's definitely much more sloppy than my P2V.
 
This was normal, GPS mode. I'm not trying to do anything crazy. I'm just trying to find out if this is expected behavior or not--with full stabilization I would expect it to be tighter, and it's definitely much more sloppy than my P2V.
there are settings where you can change the yaw,breaking and such that should help
sounds like your drifting in a turn
 
Thanks. I'm loathe to start messing too much with the parameters, as I suspect pretty awful things can happen if you get too far out of bounds, but I'll check it out. Seems odd that the default settings would handle like this, but I've seen a lot of oddness. ;)

To put it in a concrete way, when I yaw while moving forward the craft essentially continues in the same direction for a couple of seconds (flying at an angle relative to the centerline of the aircraft) before it finally starts to change course visibly. Do others see this behavior?
 
Yes I've noticed this but put it in sports mode. Big difference in how it turns. Almost turns on a dime in sports mode
 
Yes I've noticed this but put it in sports mode. Big difference in how it turns. Almost turns on a dime in sports mode
Thanks, this is helpful. To me this violates the Principle of Least Astonishment; while amped up control levels are usually harder to handle, I would expect that a beginner would do better with being able to turn away from things. Though in retrospect, when I first started flying these things and got into trouble, I tended to move to the side directly rather than trying to yaw through a turn to avoid things.

I've only had the beast for two days and haven't tried Sport mode yet (something about discretion and valor) but I'll give it a shot.
 
Maybe because the Mavic is designed to be a flying camera. So in GPS mode, maybe it’s ‘slowed’ a bit to give better, smoother videos.
 
Maybe because the Mavic is designed to be a flying camera. So in GPS mode, maybe it’s ‘slowed’ a bit to give better, smoother videos.
So was the P2V, but you're right, it does make for smoother camera work.

Basically, all I want to make sure is that my unit is behaving as it should, and it sounds like it is. Now it's just practice. But we're getting one of our ten days of crappy weather per year tomorrow, so I'll have to wait a day. Poor me. ;-)
 
Put it in Cinematic mode and see how slow the controls react. Thank god I was in open field when I was checking it out, if it had been a tight tree lined area it would have spelled disaster.
 
Thanks. I'm loathe to start messing too much with the parameters, as I suspect pretty awful things can happen if you get too far out of bounds, but I'll check it out. Seems odd that the default settings would handle like this, but I've seen a lot of oddness. ;)

To put it in a concrete way, when I yaw while moving forward the craft essentially continues in the same direction for a couple of seconds (flying at an angle relative to the centerline of the aircraft) before it finally starts to change course visibly. Do others see this behavior?

I see exactly this behavior and think it is just the way it flies.
 
If you want it to turn sharp without the skidding, you'll have to bank left or right (right stick forward and to the left or right) while also left stick to the left or right. You have to coordinate the two sticks. This is the fundamentals of how fixed-wing aircraft fly. It is essentially using the rudder to turn the nose of the aircraft and then at the same time use the ailerons to tilt the aircraft. It takes some practice but youll see that the quad will not skid as much.
 
You can take screenshots before you change parameters, and if you don’t like the changes, put it back. I always take screenshots before making any changes. I think there’s also a “Factory Default “ if it all fails[emoji6]
 
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