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
I just wanted to put this information wherever someone like myself would look to resolve a similar problem.
I have been fighting a problem all weekend on a new build where the transmitter would not are the ESCs however the APM 2.6 would arm them. I found several problem that would possibly cause this however each time that I corrected one and then tried to arm, nothing had changed. About to pull my hair out when I saw an action in MP hidden in a drop down that said PRE-Flight calibration. Oh well I might as well I pushed it and I am not even sure that there was any confirmation that it had been done. Next try at arming (#4,322) I almost came out of the chair and ask the wife "What Is That Noise" aah the motors were spinning.
I must say I have not read 1 iota about this in all of the many threads that I have scoured looking for the answer. The one prerequisite is that all of the other pilot errors have to be cleared first which I had my share.
Now my question is how would I accomplish this in the field with just a transmitter in my hand and no connection to MP?
Regards
John
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