I have an issue with a hexacopter that I can't seem to cure and I was hoping someone could help me out. After completing the build I test flew the hex twice without incident, each of the two flights lasting about 15-16 minutes. Landed and immediately checked all ESCs and motors for heat cause I was aware this was a good indicator for electrical issues. On my 3rd flight I got a little cocky and flew a few hundred feet out over a field, that flight resulted in an end over end crash. I wasn't sure what caused it but looking at the damage I thought perhaps the soldering failed on the board where I connected the battery leads. I ordered a power module the next day along with carbon fiber tubes to replace the two arms that broke as a result of the crash.
I rebuilt the hexacopter from the ground up to insure I had good solder joints on everything. The build went well, confidence was high at completion I plugged her in and flew around the back yard grass hopping so to speak and I thought I was ready for the field again. I took her out to the field, plugged in my battery pack, armed the Pixhawk and began to spin up the motors, ESC under motor 5 puffed smoke and burst into flames.
Unsure what to do I turned to the forum for answers. The majority of people suggested the obvious; check and make sure positive was connected to positive, negative to negative, they were. Some folks suggested I had a bad ESC so I changed that (obviously had to anyway since the old one was incinerated) along with a new motor. I wasn't really sure either was the cause, but went along with it anyway cause I had no clue. I knew my soldering was good cause I had triple checked. I didn't believe the ESC was bad because it had flown before, never showing signs of heat.
After rebuilding the hexacopter I finally was ready to test fly again. First flight I got off the ground level but had no yaw control so I set it back down after a 30 second flight and took it inside to check PIDs, sure enough yaw was set to 0. 2nd flight the yaw control was there but she went over sideways on take off so I power cycled it to reboot the Pixhawk thinking it needed to be refreshed. When I plugged the battery back in, armed, spun up the motors, I once again saw a puff of smoke from motor 5, however this time I was quick enough to unplug the battery before the whole thing went up in flames. I had plugged in the battery a few times on the bench during the rebuild, plugged it into my computer for calibration, spun motors with and without props and never felt heat from any of the electronic speed controllers or motors. Then all of a sudden dead 5s dead again in somewhat similar fashion to the first time
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Can anyone please offer me any input as to what the root of this issue might be? I'm running a Pixhawk flight management system on the 680pro with Multistar Elite 4006 740kv, Turnigy Plush 30A ESC and a NanoTech 4s 6000mah battery.
Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!
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