068. Drone IMU Calibration
04/01/19 • 11 min
If you're looking to make the jump from sporadic revenue to scalable and consistent growth in your drone business, TDT Pro is for you!
Check out The Drone Trainer Pro right here!
This week while the temperatures were hovering just above freezing, I decided to conduct a IMU calibration on my DJI Phantom 4 Pro. After completing the calibration, I wondered what the rest of the drone community was up to, and reached out to find out all of the best practices!
What is a drone's IMU?
IMU (inertial measurement unit) calibration is one of those things that is critical to keeping your drone straight and level. The IMU is a sensor that detects motion along a horizontal plane, as well as increases and decreases in altitude. Having a tightly calibrated IMU is critical to having the drone know what zero motion feels like. Without a good IMU calibration, your drone will potentially think that it's drifting off in a certain direction, and then create an opposite input. Yeah, it's going to become very difficult to control and won't be stable in flight at all!
My IMU calibration
This week with the temperatures just above zero, I conducted a IMU calibration in the middle of a wide open field without any interference. It's important to do them without any interference, as a bad calibration can lead to disaster once in the air and away from the "calibrated" interference. Same goes for the compass, but I'll leave that for a separate discussion.
During the calibration, the DJI tutorial showed the drone with the props removed, however I did mine with the props still attached. There are three reasons that I can think of that they'd recommend props removed during the calibration. First is if the drone was to somehow start up during calibration, you likely wouldn't have control. Second is that you may not get the drone totally level during calibration. And finally, depending on the composition of your props, there is a possibility they could interfere with a clean IMU calibration.
Anyway, even with the props on I was able to precisely calibrate the IMU. I was further able to confirm this by taking the drone to another location with a lot of interference, and was still able to fly it without any issue at all. Thats a good thing to remember if you're looking for a place to calibrate your drone's IMU. Choose a location without any interference, or as little as possible, and then move to your area of higher interference to fly. Don't do it the other way around, as I mentioned above, it can cause all kinds of problems.
What does everyone else say?
Knowing that it's always best to share information so that we can all improve, I decided to ask my drone community what their best practices are when it comes to IMU calibration. There are a variety of responses and techniques, and I'm sure you can pick up a little tidbit of info from each one. Let's see what the community has to say in this week's episode!
Final thoughts on drone IMU calibration
As can you see by the comments above, there are some varying opinions when it comes to calibrating your IMU. Some say if it's not broke, don't try and fix it, while others are suggesting doing it before every flight. I think that doing it, over not doing it at all is a good idea, but make sure that you do it in an interference free area. Keep it away from all metal, bluetooth, watches, cellphones, power-lines, vehicles, rebar, and anything else that you think could cause interference.
Also to answer a few of the above questions, yes temperature can play into your IMU calibration. I'm not 100% sure about high temperatures, but colder temperatures definitely have an effect on calibration and allowing your drone to operate in cooler weather. I have a full article on winter drone flight tips, where I discuss the benefits of calibrating in a cooler environment. As I don't live in a screaming hot place, I'm looking to you to let me know if you've experienced differences in calibrations in high temperatures.
What do you say?
After reading all of the opinions above, what do you think? Are you going to modify the way that you conduct your drone's IMU calibration? Or are you going to keep on keeping on? Regardless, let us know below in the comments so that we can keep on learning from each other! When you're finished leaving your comment, get out there and fly! Have fun, and be sure to keep the spinny side up!
If you're looking to make the jump from sporadic revenue to scalable and consistent growth in your drone business, TDT Pro is for you!
Check out The Drone Trainer Pro right here!
This week while the temperatures were hovering just above freezing, I decided to conduct a IMU calibration on my DJI Phantom 4 Pro. After completing the calibration, I wondered what the rest of the drone community was up to, and reached out to find out all of the best practices!
What is a drone's IMU?
IMU (inertial measurement unit) calibration is one of those things that is critical to keeping your drone straight and level. The IMU is a sensor that detects motion along a horizontal plane, as well as increases and decreases in altitude. Having a tightly calibrated IMU is critical to having the drone know what zero motion feels like. Without a good IMU calibration, your drone will potentially think that it's drifting off in a certain direction, and then create an opposite input. Yeah, it's going to become very difficult to control and won't be stable in flight at all!
My IMU calibration
This week with the temperatures just above zero, I conducted a IMU calibration in the middle of a wide open field without any interference. It's important to do them without any interference, as a bad calibration can lead to disaster once in the air and away from the "calibrated" interference. Same goes for the compass, but I'll leave that for a separate discussion.
During the calibration, the DJI tutorial showed the drone with the props removed, however I did mine with the props still attached. There are three reasons that I can think of that they'd recommend props removed during the calibration. First is if the drone was to somehow start up during calibration, you likely wouldn't have control. Second is that you may not get the drone totally level during calibration. And finally, depending on the composition of your props, there is a possibility they could interfere with a clean IMU calibration.
Anyway, even with the props on I was able to precisely calibrate the IMU. I was further able to confirm this by taking the drone to another location with a lot of interference, and was still able to fly it without any issue at all. Thats a good thing to remember if you're looking for a place to calibrate your drone's IMU. Choose a location without any interference, or as little as possible, and then move to your area of higher interference to fly. Don't do it the other way around, as I mentioned above, it can cause all kinds of problems.
What does everyone else say?
Knowing that it's always best to share information so that we can all improve, I decided to ask my drone community what their best practices are when it comes to IMU calibration. There are a variety of responses and techniques, and I'm sure you can pick up a little tidbit of info from each one. Let's see what the community has to say in this week's episode!
Final thoughts on drone IMU calibration
As can you see by the comments above, there are some varying opinions when it comes to calibrating your IMU. Some say if it's not broke, don't try and fix it, while others are suggesting doing it before every flight. I think that doing it, over not doing it at all is a good idea, but make sure that you do it in an interference free area. Keep it away from all metal, bluetooth, watches, cellphones, power-lines, vehicles, rebar, and anything else that you think could cause interference.
Also to answer a few of the above questions, yes temperature can play into your IMU calibration. I'm not 100% sure about high temperatures, but colder temperatures definitely have an effect on calibration and allowing your drone to operate in cooler weather. I have a full article on winter drone flight tips, where I discuss the benefits of calibrating in a cooler environment. As I don't live in a screaming hot place, I'm looking to you to let me know if you've experienced differences in calibrations in high temperatures.
What do you say?
After reading all of the opinions above, what do you think? Are you going to modify the way that you conduct your drone's IMU calibration? Or are you going to keep on keeping on? Regardless, let us know below in the comments so that we can keep on learning from each other! When you're finished leaving your comment, get out there and fly! Have fun, and be sure to keep the spinny side up!
Previous Episode
067. Iowa Drone Pilot Danny Engesser
If you're looking to make the jump from sporadic revenue to scalable and consistent growth in your drone business, TDT Pro is for you!
Check out The Drone Trainer Pro right here!
Danny Engesser is an IT professional who has been running his drone side hustle for the past year. He started off with a Parrot AR, and has since moved up to the DJI Phantom 3 Advanced and now the Inspire 1. So far he's been working in a variety of industries including energy, car dealerships, and corporate group photos.
Utilizing the LAANC system (Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability), Danny has been able to fly missions in a variety of controlled airspace. So far he's found the system to be fairly straightforward, and hasn't had any issue on obtaining airspace permissions. While in the air, Danny prefers to use the DJI Go app, however has been tinkering with Litchi as well lately. I've used litchi myself, but we also discuss my personal preference of Hangar's Autopilot.
Danny mentions that he had some trouble with the Inspire 1's firmware, and figured out a way to downgrade it to the original settings. It takes some work, but he has posted instructions for how to make this happen. I haven't had to try something like this, but it looks like a good option for drone pilots that are having issue with their firmware and want to start over from scratch. Alternatively, you can use my method of refreshing the firmware to keep things up to date with a clean install.
For insurance, Danny choses Verifly to cover him on a flight by flight basis. So far he's had pricing ranging from $10 up to $130, with the increase likely based on the operational airspace. There may be a few other factors that cause the price to jump, but in his tests he's found that small adjustments have caused significant price changes.
Next Episode
069. Drones in Italy with Filippo Canepa
If you're looking to make the jump from sporadic revenue to scalable and consistent growth in your drone business, TDT Pro is for you!
Check out The Drone Trainer Pro right here!
Filippo Canepa is a 35 year old drone pilot from Turin, Italy. Along with his brother, he is operating a real estate business, concentrating on renting, sales, and a new builds. And guess what? He's looking to use his drone to promote his real estate business! Filippo is flying the Mavic Air, Inspire 2, and is looking at picking up a DJI Spark.
Before he gets going in his real estate business, he's working on studying for and passing his drone license exams in Italy. One of the hurdles that he has to overcome is passing the practical flight exam. This exam is a hands on flight test, where he has to fly with and without a GPS signal. The test even takes things a little further by not allowing use of a screen during testing. Yeah, you have to fly 100% by keeping your eye on the drone, all while in non-GPS mode. If you're looking for training for how to fly in ATTI mode, I have just thing thing for you right here.
We also discuss the commercial and recreational drone flight rules in Italy. Currently there is a division between what you can do as a licensed vs non licensed operator, and we go over all of it during our chat. If you'd rather read about the Italian drone rules, check out this resource for everything that you need to know about flying in Italy.
Filippo is running a few instagram accounts, both personal and a collaboration with his friend Ben Skaar.
I hope you enjoyed this week's drone podcast with Filippo Canepa! Once you've had a listen, feel free to leave a comment below so that Filippo and I can hear what you think!
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