I took my Iris+ out to test its limits. Running it on altitude hold, I took it straight out to a small town in the distance. I stopped about 1600 feet from the town, all still looked good, still had video 90 percent of the time then I hit the throttle and it just quit giving me any video. It was just like the battery came out. Usually you still have some video if you get too far away. So I immediately set the RTL and held the transmitter up as high as I could...still no video. I kept the transmitter on so I had the last GPS coordinates. Punched it into a app I had on my cell phone and set out to see if I could find it. The GPS settings was right were I had lost the video so I headed into the town. Using the video strength was able to find it after about an hour of hunting, I had installed a bright flashing light on the front that alos helped a lot to find it. It landed about 2000 feet from where I lost video, it was upside down with two arms totally gone. One arm that was still there but the motor was just hanging on as it had almost melted off. It looked like the motors just kept running for quite a while as the tips were flared from running against the cement wall it was next too.
Before I played back the video I was thinking that the RTL doesn't work when you are in ATL HOLD mode so that would explain to me why it didn't return when I hit the RTL switch. After playing the video back I saw where I had stopped but then it showed IRIS heading full steam and descending very rapidly as it slammed into a street light pole.
I can't explain this can you? The log files are not downloadable according to Mission planner and a lot of parameters got changed some how.
I found the missing arms and after about $70 of parts it is amazingly up and flying again. Then I found that the RTL DOES work when in the ALT HOLD mode so I am totally puzzled as to what happened.
Anybody have an idea what happened?
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