External compass for MikroKopter

One of the most sensitive and critical devices embedded on a drone is definitely the on-board compass. Unfortunately, this device may easily be affected by external electromagnetic disturbances.
In order to further improve the GPS orientation of the drone, MikroKopter has developed an external compass board that can be placed away of the electromagnetic fields.



Some heavy configurations - and thus energy intensive - disturb the compass during large current demands of the aircraft.
The magnetic field created at that time is proportional to the current and creates false readings on the magnetometer which may disturb the flight in certain situations.
This problem can be eliminated thanks to this external compass that can be installed in a "magnetic safe" place, away from the power cables and other magnetic fields of the drone.



The standard compass, installed on the Navi-Ctrl is automatically ignored by the system and only the new one is taken into account for the flight calculations.

Connecting the new compass on the Navi-Ctrl v2.0 is easy and it is done with 4 wires.

The connection on the Navi-Ctrl v2.1 is even easier, as a Molex connector is foreseen for this on that version.



Several mounting directions are possible for this new board, to allow everyone to find the best place on his aircraft for this compass. They are set in the MikroKopter configuration software (MKTool) under "Compass Offset".

With this new device, the GPS accuracy is increased and this makes operations such as position hold, coming home, waypoints navigation etc more accurate than ever.

The external compass is available here.