Hi All.. Was hoping my first post here would be on better terms!
I purchased a 3DR kit a few weeks back and since have successfully built it and taken my quadcopter out for a few test flights.
Everything has been working absolutely flawlessly with ArduCopter 2.9. Nice and stable. After getting the hang of flying the quad around in stabilize mode I also successfully tested Alt Hold, Loiter, and RTL with no issues.
This afternoon I took the quad out for another test flight, flew it around in stabilize mode and then decided to give Alt Hold another test run. I noticed that when accelerating forward the quad wouldn't keep altitude and the farther I would go, the lower it would get. Going in reverse had the opposite effect.
I then brought the quad back to me and decided to do a few loiter tests. When flipping the loiter switch the quad started showing very strange behavior and would immediately start to roll or pitch in one direction, I flipped back to stabilize mode after a few seconds of seeing this to recover.
Towards the end of my flight I was steering the quad back to me when it lost responsiveness within 15 feet of me and continued accelerating in my direction. Finally when it was about 5 feet away i was able to regain control to slow it down a little bit, but shortly after it lost responsiveness again and continued straight into the side of a shed.
Even after killing the throttle and turning off the radio after the crash the props continued to spin. only when I disconnected the battery did everything fully shut off.
Any ideas what could have caused this? It took me off guard since all of the other test flights had been so successful.
I downloaded all of the logs from this afternoon's flight. I'd love to analyze them, but being so new to this sport I have no idea where to start. Anyone out there willing to help me take a look?
Thanks!!
Replies
Just an update for anyone who stumbles across this thread... Disassembled the quad this weekend to see if any of the wiring looked suspicious. Turns out the channel 6 wire on my transmitter came disconnected towards the end of the flight. This explains why I thought I lost connectivity to the quad and even after killing the throttle the motors wouldn't stop. I was in alt-hold before the cable came unplugged and even though I had switched back to stabilize on the controller the quad never received the command.
Lesson learned. Make sure your wiring to your transmitter is secure!
I'm still curious about the loiter issue though, as I don't think it's directly related. Once i'm done with the waiting game on a few parts to come in I'll test it out further. In the meantime, if anyone sees anything suspicious about the loiter behavior in the logs attached it would be really helpful. Thanks!