I have been trying to get my drone flying for about 3 months with no success.
It appears to have hung up after moving to the 3.x version of firmware.
Symptoms.
1- I cannot ARM the motors.
1.1 I have GPS lock.
1.2 When I move the rudder to the right for 5 seconds the RED LED on the APM flashes 3 short flashes and then a longer red flash then it goes off.
1.3 GPS lock remains.
1.4 Rudder is not swapped or trims goofed up in any way.
2- I have noticed that when I attempt to arm the motors the MP seems to hang.
3- When I have speech turned on in MP immediately following an arming attempt. The MP starts to call out "no data received for xx seconds" (fill in xx with 10 - 20 etc.)
4- I tried like mad to see if I goofed something up. The calibration processes works just fine.
To make matters worse, I cannot back down to a lower version of firmware to prove this theory. When I attempt to lower the firmware it appears to load to the APM but I am not able to complete the calibration. It will not allow me to configure the radio. It acts as if it doesn't exist. I erased the firmware via the CLI prior to loading new and that doesn't help either.
under a separate thread listed "Cannot arm APM 2.5" I tried a number of additional items there. HELP please.
Any guidance would be awesome, I'm about ready to throw this thing across the room.
Replies
Sounds like a hardware problem (3.x is more demanding and won't allow bad hardware readings that might have been allowed in earlier versions). Open up the Monitor window in the MP (you can enable it with the checkbox on the Help tab and then restart the MP) and check the text that comes over during the startup. You may see error messages.
You can also check the MAVLink status messages on the Messages tab on the Flight Data screen