Hi, I recently upgraded from the cube black to the cube orange, and ever since I have had countless compass problems with the cube orange. For a while, I was getting the prearm check mag field even after multiple successful calibrations (even after waiting for the cube to warm up and in a completely empty field) and wiping the cube by installing arduplane then copter again. Eventually, this problem went away but the magnetic field in the tuning tab varies much more than before with the cube black, instead of like a 1-5 magfield difference on the cube black it skips around 10-50 now (for example one second it will say 320 and then the next 370 which doesn’t make sense). I am also using the same compass/GPS as before the here GNSS. This then causes the cube to occasionally go into a compass inconsistent state, I am not sure what I should do. Any help would be appreciated.
@philip @MadRC
Hi Tim, If you are not using the internal compass I would disable it via the COMPASS_TYPEMASK pram.
This will allow you to completely disable the internal compass.
Its a different sensor and setup and it sounds like something is interfering.
Hi, thanks for the reply, what would be the best way to make sure that my hardware is not faulty, the cube orange feels much lower quality than the cube black, for example, the usb port barely feels like it plugs in when I plug in the micro usb cable and the actual cube moves around on the carrier board when a little force is applied on it and I made sure all the screws were tight, and this is slightly concerning. Thanks
@MadRC
when you say the cube moves on the carrier board what do you mean? as it shouldnt, but i would like to clarify this
When I put a tiny force on the actual cube itself it seems to move just a tiny bit either left and right or front and back, but not up or down. I have a cube black and it doesn’t move whatsoever when a force is applied to it. It is like the cube isn’t fully secure to the carrier board, and I have tried to tighten all the screws and it didn’t help.
@Michael_Oborne
Can you post a video to show this ?
oh and regarding your original question, this might be because of the cube orange heater. if you let it get to temp first, this will normalise
I found that when the heater is on it seems to be normal but when the heater is done heating it causes the magnetic field to fluctuate a lot, for example, it will start with the heater on around 320 for the magfield with +or - 5 variation but once the cube is up to temperature (after waiting around 10 minutes) it will fluctuate +or- 20 to 40 for the magfield, while making sure that external compass is disconnected. This is done outside in a field away from metal, just the cube itself disconnected from the drone. Even when I try to use q ground control to calibrate the compass (idk why just a last-ditch effort) it is always in the red area which according to the software means the compass is bad and should not be used. Maybe this is normal but compared to the cube black it seems to be way jumpier. Thanks for your help.
Here a video of it, hard to show the movement because I didn’t have a good way to film and the movement is pretty small, but you are able to hear the noise of it moving in this video.
i wanted to see it on the carrier board, and moving, because yes, in your case it will be lose. the reason is around the ability to reduce mechanical stress on the internals, by having a little movement to prevent alignment and stress issues
Ok thanks, sorry for the confusion, and for the magfield it is normal that it fluctuates a lot once the heater is completed warming up. This doesn’t make much sense to me due to amperes law.
@Michael_Oborne
in general the internal compass is not recommended, but is a last resort, try graphing the heat on off events vs the mag x/y/z values. to confirm this is what your seeing. it is possible to change the heat pid’s to reduce this effect
Yeah, you were correct turning off the heating element by setting the target temp to room temperature seemed to fix the problem. The magfield was acting very similar to the one on my original here GNSS which has the same icm20948 as the cube orange. Thanks for the help.