Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

Testing and fine tuning TECS

You'll need to test your tune and dial it in before moving on to setting up autonomous landing. Here are the steps for testing:

1. Set the aircraft into a loiter around your home point using RTL. Make sure that it's able to maintain altitude without a variance greater than 10 m. If it begins to oscillate height, increase the TECS_TIME_CONST. Increase by only 1 at a time. If you find yourself making an overall change of 10 or more, you'll need to go all the way back and check your original PID tuning.
2. Check that the balance between THR_MAX, TECS_CLIMB_MAX, and LIM_PITCH_MAX is correct. Simply send a command for the aircraft to increase altitude by about 60 m while in loiter around RTL. Throttle should go to around ...