Rudder calibration not working

[seandepagnier]

Thanks Sean, seems like this must be what is happening.

It seems very strange that the tinypilot would ever READ settings from the motor controller and then write those settings to pypilot.conf. Surely it should only ever read the settings from pypilot.conf and write them to the motor controller? Maybe copying all settings from pypilot.conf to the motor controller eeprom should be part of the boot process so we can be sure everything is in sync?

It is not very strange... Consider if you upgrade the sd card image. It will erase pypilot.conf settings and they go back to default. If you connect to the motor controller, it will get the old settings for the motor this way.

Another case, is you have two motor controllers each set up for different motors with different settings.

I agree it's confusing now, and doesn't always do the best thing, but I'm not sure how to handle all cases or if it's even possible.

After editing pypilot.conf, it seems that the changes were not being sent to the motor controller.  Is there a way to force the tinypilot to write the changes to the motor controller from the current pypilot.conf, without reading any settings from the motor controller? A command I can enter after saving the conf file?

If you change the settings while pypilot is running, it will send them to the controller.

I will try to update the image when I can but I guess that means removing the pilot, taking it apart, removing the sd card, flashing the new image onto the SD card, re-doing all the edits to all the files I've changed and then putting it all back together. It's also rather big to download on my mobile data. It's very unlikely I'll have time for that before we have to sail so for the moment, I really need to just be able to save the new settings successfully down to the motor controller, ensuring all old settings are overwritten.

You can upgrade pypilot using git:

Code:

ssh tc@192.168.14.1
cd pypilot

If tinypilot doesn't have internet access, you can clone or update the pypilot repository somewhere, then from tinypilot pull it and update:

Code:

git pull user@host:pypilot  
. pypilot.build
sudo reboot

What I could do is pull the latest changes from git and copy just the modified files over to the pypilot using sftp over wifi. Is it possible to update it like that or is it really necessary to replace the whole sd card image?

Not needed to replace the image in this case, but it will only get pypilot changes, not other changes to tinypilot which is fine in this case.

PS. It seems very rare that the motor controller would be changed for one with different settings (except while you are building motor controllers!) but perhaps the motor controller could have a unique ID on it and the pypilot then only ever reads settings from the motor controller if it detects during boot up that the unique ID has changed since the last boot up? If the unique ID is unset then pypilot would set one using a random value, but not read the settings? It might be an interesting question how we get a random value seed considering the pypilots all start up with the clock set to the exact same time!

Yes, it's possible, but it would also only solve the case of modifying pypilot.conf directly. I'm not sure many users do this. Another possible case it to compare timestamp of pypilot.conf to another file and if the timestamps differ, then it could ignore the values on the motor controller knowing a user edited pypilot.conf.