Well, the good news first. We have made headway on obtaining our compass heading through the GPS chip. We have adjusted our parser to discriminate the NMEA strings based on their “tag” (default config. spits out 3 different strings) and to pull out the true heading. It is kinda cloudy today in meadville so we got a satellite lock but I don’t think that it was a great one.
The bad news is that the airplane still has the tendency to nose down and to the left. We did a little bit more ground testing today to rule out the presence of crippling motor noise. We didn’t notice much change of the leveling reflexes between throttle off and throttle on (1-100%). We did a little manual linkage adjustment because the trim on the radio was slightly off from the trim on the autopilot (very possibly leading to a left turn). We also doubled the amount of elevator throw that the airplane has when trying to correct an improper pitch condition.
Hopefully the weather clears up soon so that we can fly…
Ian