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[WIP] Magnetometer Calibration algorithm documentation #2338

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@junwoo091400 junwoo091400 commented Mar 12, 2023

Motivation

As noted in PX4/PX4-Autopilot#19459, the calibration algorithm in PX4 is sophisticated & amazing, but it isn't well documented and reading the code to understand it is quite challenging (due to it's complexity), this adds a documentation for what Magnetometer calibration actually does.

This came up while discussing whether PX4 includes online soft iron calibration feature, which was hard to figure out by reading the codebase! And only 10+ minutes later, I realized offline soft iron calibration is implemented in this PR: PX4/PX4-Autopilot#15235

Relevant Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/YohanHadji/status/1566075481576931330
Relevant Discord message: https://discord.com/channels/1022170275984457759/1032412576727978084/1084491061935738930

Relevant doc (perhaps): https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-AN2272_PSoC_1_Sensing_Magnetic_Compass_with_Tilt_Compensation-ApplicationNotes-v04_00-EN.pdf?fileId=8ac78c8c7cdc391c017d0731b0d05573

TODOs

  • Include diagram about soft iron calibration (how off-diagonal scaling comes into play)
  • Include hard iron calibration diagram (how diagonal scaling affects)
  • Include flowchart of how the calibration data gets applied (with units)

@junwoo091400 junwoo091400 requested a review from bresch March 12, 2023 17:59
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Btw @bresch it seems like this paper implements online 'soft iron' calibration. Any reason why this wasn't implemented, but only the 'hard iron' calibration was adapted in PX4/PX4-Autopilot#18327?

4. `rotation[3 x 3]`: Final rotation matrix to transform magnetometer data from sensor frame to body frame, set via setting the rotation enum as in [Flight Controller Orientation](../config/flight_controller_orientation.md).


## Orthogonal offset calibration
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First letter capitalization everywhere.

@hamishwillee hamishwillee marked this pull request as draft March 12, 2023 21:33
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I've moved to draft. MOve it back when you are ready for review.

This is a good topic but as with any content, have a little think about who it is for, and what they will use it for. Then you ask yourself, did this doc help those people - a bit like test driven programming.

If it is developers then they probably would benefit from links to the code which implement the interesting bits. You should also provide cross links from the calibration pages because otherwise this will probably not be very discoverable.

Arguably the people who are most interested in this will already know, but I like to define what is meant by each term - so what is hard/soft iron. How does the calibration differ. What are the impacts of getting it wrong. Etc.

@hamishwillee hamishwillee marked this pull request as ready for review May 3, 2023 23:01
@hamishwillee hamishwillee marked this pull request as draft May 3, 2023 23:03
@hamishwillee hamishwillee force-pushed the pr_mag_cal_algorithm branch from 16aba62 to 02a858c Compare May 6, 2023 08:13
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This pull request has been mentioned on Discussion Forum for PX4, Pixhawk, QGroundControl, MAVSDK, MAVLink. There might be relevant details there:

https://discuss.px4.io/t/some-notes-on-everything-that-was-a-pain-in-using-px4/33573/1

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3 participants