Today I had a crash with my new tricopter. I flew it yesterday for the first time and got in 5 flights with no issues. This afternoon I decided to take off and fly behind my house climbing a big hill. Anyway, I go up about 100 ft or close to it, and suddenly everything quit and it dropped. It came down evenly and crashed into some rocks (darn the luck). I say evenly to make clear it wasn't one speed controller or one motor that quit because it fell very flat and all the props were stopped or nearly so (as the snapshot in my mind tells me).
I am using the 2.6 and have had wonderful success with it in my airplane, so much so that I was showing off by setting up a mission and having it fly from launch to landing completely hands off. Anyway, I now have a tricopter and for those first flights it was pure magic, until today.
My battery is a pretty new 3-cell 2200 which still shows 12.3v.
The GPS had a solid lock. I didn't fly a 'mission' but was using two modes only, stabilize and loiter.
The motors are Turnigy 28-26 with 8x3.8 props, which is a low amp draw.
ESC is the AfroESC 30A (30A is overkill) by SimonK.
Vibration levels are very low, with screen print of the vibe levels if anyone needs them.
I also am using the 433mHz setup, which was connected, but I don't know how to download any of that data as of yet. That is new for me, for this flight in fact.
Everything is still plugged in to the receiver, APM, etc.
Any ideas?
Best regards,
James VanWinkle
Replies
How are you powering the APM and the yaw servo? It doesn't look like you have a Power Module as there are no log entries for either current or voltage. Since your log just quits as the tricopter is still in the air, that's probably not a vibration problem. It would be more in the line of a power failure somewhere, and I'd be especially focused on power to the APM. It looks like your tricopter was doing fine (early part of the log looks great) then it just quit. No failsafes or error messages. Others may want to chime in, but this looks like an electrical or mechanical issue such as a faulty connection or the ESC powering the APM glitched.