Drifting drone
I was recently treated to the Parrot AR Drone for my birthday by my wife. I have flown RC planes before but this is my first quadcopter and I’m still getting to grips with the FreeFlight app. I have the drone in ‘flat trim’ mode, but I find it often drifts quite badly in one direction – and not always the same one! I’ve tried compensating with the manual trim settings but I have to adjust the values on each flight. Is this a bug or is my drone faulty? Alastair Crewkerne
I haven’t played with the AR Drone myself, but from the manual and the FAQ at ardrone2.parrot.com/faq, I think you might be enabling Flat Trim while your quadcopter is sitting on a slope. The Flat Trim mode zeroes the trim values for the onboard gyroscopes, assuming the drone is sitting on a level surface. If you’re on the side of a hill, you are essentially programming in a control bias that will try to move the drone in whatever direction was downhill when you enabled Flat Trim. To fix this, put the drone on a horizontal surface, open the FreeFlight app and tap the Flat Trim button. You should be able to leave the Trim Select settings on Auto and it will still fly level.