Discussions

Hello everyone,

I recently finished my 1st quadcopter (F450 frame, emax 2213 motors, 30A ESCs, 1045 plastic props, 4200mah 3S lipo, Pixhawk controller, 1200g with battery installed), and had some test flights, the last one of them resulting in crash. The other issue I've had was very short flight time, about 5 minutes of hovering and gaining some altitude in my first flight. I was trying to figure out the problems by analyzing the logs in Mission Planner, but the amount of information there is overwhelming and I would like to ask for some clues. Would be great if someone could check the logs and give me some insight.

My first flight went great, I took off in PosHold mode, hovered a bit, then flew around. After that the battery voltage warning on my remote went off after 3 minutes and I landed. I think I had the warning threshold set at 10.6v. 2nd flight with the other battery was pretty much the same, may be 5 minutes or so. I am attching the logs of the first flight. I see that RCOUT for the 3rd motor was much higher than for other motors. Am I correct that this was the reason of such a short flight time?

The next day after thinking it over I decided to lower low voltage threshold both in mission planner and my remote a bit and try flyng with gimbal and camera attched (which added 250g of weigt). Took of normally, slowly gained 17m of heght according to logs and suddenly it felt like the quad hit some invisible ceiling, the sound of motors has changed too. So I lowered throttle a bit, let the quad lower and tried raising again a couple of times with the same result. I landed, took of again and approximately at the same height the quad stopped, motors sound (or should I say propellers sound) changed again and then it started falling waggling in the air. The motors were still running. My understanding is it was trying to stabilize but could not, so I think one of the motors or ESC malfunctioned. It fell into snow and one ESC started smoking. I think it only started smoking on the ground and not in the air. In the logs I see current consumption peaking only after hitting the ground, which I think proves that the ESC died on the ground. I notice that this time RCOUT of the 3rd motor is clipping on the graph. Does that mean it was running at full power most of the time?

As a result ESC on motor 1 burned out, motor 1 is a bit harder to turn by hand than others. These 2 parts I will have to replace. But should I also replace motor 3 because it seems to be outputting less thrust than others? Should I also consider different batteries, or the problem lies in faulty motor? Too many factors for me to consider, so I would appreciate help from gurus. Logs attached. Sorry for the long post, but I tired to be specific :)

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