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
Replies
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.
Maybe you want to attach your log files (.log and .tlog).
This would be the first step for debugging.