Motors beeping and twitching + 3dradio won't connect

Hi All,

Just got my arducopter quad and not one day after getting it up and running, the thing has become totally unusable.  Not only that, I'm at a complete loss as to how to even go about diagnosing the problem(s).  Hopefully someone could lend me some advice?

So here's what happened - I was doing some testing yesterday in order to familiarize myself with the controls (just putting the throttle high enough for the copter to hover a few inches off the ground, then easing it back down) when the whole system started to slow down.  I figured it was the battery, so I charged it up a bit but when I plugged it back into the 'copter it didn't succeed in starting back up.  It made the expected initialization beeps followed by the motors all twitching a little bit.  After that though, it just kept twitching one of its motors and issuing 3 beeps at about 1 second intervals.  After that, I haven't been able to connect to it using the 3DRadio (USB is still working fine, though).

Today's behavior's been even more troubling, though.  I've been able to reproduce the behavior described above, but it's also done a couple other things:

A.) Sending out a long stream of single-beeps and then cycling the 3-beeps at an interval

B.) Playing the start-up beeps twice in a row and then crapping out (no sound or lights on the APM board).

I've also noticed that the tone of the beeps has become lower (I think that's just a battery that needs to be charged, though).

I've tried all the easy fixes which I could find online (calibrating the radio, reinstalling the firmware + reconfiguring the accelerometers), so I guess I'm going to try re-configuring the ESCs next.  Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated, though.

Thanks

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  • So after the full day's tinkering, I've made some head-way on this (in the end, very embarrassing) issue and it's left me with a few more questions. 

    Apparently the problem was just caused by my ignorance when it came to the usage of LiPo batteries.  I had used the battery to the point where the voltage was so low that the charger wouldn't even accept it! 

    While trying to solve my problem by reading though the forums, I came across this post with a break-down of the beep codes generated by the APM.  Even though the problem was power related, the three-beep error which I was getting back suggests a problem with the throttle.  Anyone have an idea why this would be the case?

  • What sort of battery are you using?  Type/number of cells, capacity etc?

      

    I would only ever recommend FULLY charging your battery - not just putting 'a bit' in it.

     

    Have you got any logs?

     

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