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Debugging after a confusing crash

Posted by Sam on April 22, 2013 at 5:45pm

Hi Everyone,

     Last week I had a pretty bad crash from ~35 meters w/ my new GoPro attached.  The flight started off well in stabilize mode.  I took the 'copter up pretty high and set it to loiter mode so that I could get a good high-def look at the neighborhood. At this point it seemed to be acting a little hinky though, so I sent it into landing mode and waited for it to come down, which it did - like a rock.  The FPV footage also shows that the motors were making an awful shrieking noise all the way down.

      Thankfully there wasn't too much damage.  The zip-ties holding the GoPro totally disintegrated and let the camera harmlessly bounce away through the grass.  This being said, I REALLY don't wanna have another of these.  I know that's not entirely possible, but I'm sure there are measures I can take to at least make it happen very rarely, which brings me to the subject of debugging.

      In a situation like this what's the best place to start?  I took a look at the logs, and while they seem to show the same crash that I saw - they're not very illuminating when it comes to the cause.  As a software developer, I'm more than willing to add countermeasures to the APM codebase if I can establish the cause of the error (and that cause wasn't my flying).  I'm just not sure where to start.....

      Anyone have any useful tips for log/software debugging after a crash?  I'm open to any and all advice.

Thanks

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Tags: analysis, coding, crash, debugging, development, logging, safety, software
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Replies

  • Brian Sigmon April 22, 2013 at 7:21pm

    Shrieking noise - When I was building my multicopter I had an ESC issue where the ESC would get out of sync with the motor.  When this happen the motor made a bad squeal and no power to speak of.  I crashed once because of this.  I replaced my ESCs with a different type to get rid of the problem.

    Testing for this is fairly easy.  I could get my motors to squeal on the ground with the props off by moving my sticks back and forth to the limits rapidly.  Sometimes I had to do this for a while to make a motor squeal.   Different ESCs made this problem go away.

  • criro1999 April 22, 2013 at 6:50pm

    Maybe you want to attach your log files (.log and .tlog). 

    This would be the first step for debugging.

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