INAV: unsynced gyro updates
Until recently, INAV concentrated on GPS and navigation support. Comparing to Betaflight, or even Cleanflight, its acro capabilities were rather limited. Flyable, but limited. Now we are trying to catch up. While upcoming INAV 1.2 will rather not change much in this topic, there are few experimental code versions that might greatly improve INAV acro capabilities. One of them is separation of gyroscope readouts from PID loop.
INAV and FP-PID with extensive floating point logic are rather slow. Looptime 2000us (500Hz update rate) is a limit for F1 targets and 1000us (1kHz mode) is barely reachable by most F3 targets. Version from mentioned above pull request separates gyroscope readouts and filtering from main PID loop. Thanks to that, gyro is updated much faster (up to 2.6kHz in case of F3 with I2C gyro). Faster gyro update means better signal signal quality, lower delay, better filtering and less aliasing. One the other hand, motors does not have to be updated that often. Not only they are unable to change rotation speed as fast as we can drive them, they are unable to notably change thrust as fast as we would like them to.
Let's do some math: what will the distance that tip of a 5" propeller running 12,000PRM will travel during 500us (2kHz update frequency)? About 40mm. More less 10% of a circuit. Not much distance to change generated thrust...
I'm Paweł Spychalski and I do things. Mainly software development, FPV drones and amateur cinematography. Here are my YouTube channels: