I was flying my hex today, as I was headed toward my current position it decided to not respond to my controls and keep going over me. It was about 100 feet up then looked to increase altitude a bit and kept going away. It seemed to level off and head the standard direction it would go with no input. Eventually it was out of sight and long gone.
Does anyone know what could have happened. I was in stabilized flight mode and the copter was within 200 feet of me when I lost control. Also any ideas how to get it back, I had my Gopro attached to it recording the flight.
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I had the same thing happen to me, it is a defective Turnigy 9X radio, mine was brand new out of the box and I used it 1 time before. Here is a video of what my radio did below. Luckily I was able to get my copter back after searching for 2 hours. The Turnigy radios are junk, I returned mine to HK and bought a Spektum DX18.
http://youtu.be/PRzyIgWsR8Q
I tested the failsafe response of my AR6210 in my homebrew chassis. On loss of TX signal, my receiver (Spektrum) takes the throttle output to minimum.
It really did.
In Stabilzed mode, I was hovering about 3-4 feet above some nice thick centipede grass and switched off the DX6i. The quad dropped flat quickly as the AR6210 did what it was designed to do in this case. It landed upright, the motors were off, and the 'lost frame' led (red) started flashing on the the AR6210. TX was turned back on (Throttle was set to lowest) and I proceeded to lift off and buzz around until the battery was dead.
In Colin's case, his aircraft continued on its way to an unknown (so far) fate as the receiver must have kept all outputs at the last settings. It didn't go berserk or otherwise crash. The Failsafe setting in MP depends totally on the output of the throttle setting of the Rcv to go to a minimum level (as the AR6210 does) which is set in MP. Loiter and RTL are the two APM choices when this occurs.
Of course if the quad had been 30 feet up in the air and signal were lost... a sad conclusion and a possible hazard (DO NOT fly over people and insured property).
After that test, I reset the radio cal according to the Failsafe description link (using a DX8i TX) in the Wiki.
Also, I have placarded the quad with my name and phone number -- you never know.
Cool story hoopty - thanks!
-=Doug
I had the same issue, mine went up about 12 feet and was hovering... started see-sawing...then all motors locked full on and it went straight up and out of sight.
I started running down the road screaming No...No.... It disappeared and I started a fruitless journey looking for it. I was walking through folks back yards tasking if they saw a heli. They were out eating dinner and here I come asking questions. I asked people on bicycles, people going for walks, little kids, anyone that might have seen my quad! After walking 3 miles from my house I decided to walk home. It was dark, my wife did not know where I was and I was pretty far away. Soooooo,
I decided to take a shortcut...through a cornfield. Suggestion for everyone, DONT TAKE THE CORNFIELD!!! I would wals a few feet with cornstalks taller than me, stop, wiggle the throttle on the remote and then listen. Nothing, nadda, zipp.
I did this until I saw signs of the cornfield ending. Horray!!! Nope guess what, another cornfield. I smelled skunks which I though"Oh won't that be great!" I got thru that and came out in someones back yard. She had to German Shepards and came out to see what they were barking at. I told I lost my heli (no lay person knows what a quad is) and she said "well it didn't land in my back yard because my dogs would eat it". I finally got back to the road after climbing some barbed wire fencing and stepped on to the street. I had been beaten. My quad was gone and I was already figuring how to get my wife to let me invest more money. Just then, a police car came driving by and slammed on the brakes. He hollered "Sir" and I thought I had been reported as some crazy guy walking through cornfields saying he was looking for a heli! He then got out of his police car and asked "Are you that guy walking around looking for a helicopter?" I thought great, what a perfect evening, I lost my quad and now I am going to get arrested, I told him I was and then told him how I had lost it when it went out of control. Then he said "Well I have it right here in my car." He told me some guy was sitting in his living room reading the paper and he saw it land in his front yard. The guy thought it belonged to the military and called the police!
Wow what a night.
Another option would be asking Tridge and the gang from the CanberraUAV challenge to 'lend' you the pattern recognision software used to find their target. Mount this in your backup plane and go look for missing hexie....in a perfect world. Just a thought.
Hi, yeah, that sucks. I had a similar situation a whist ago. My quad took a direction and maintained at about 50m. I had telemetry on, but it dissapeared behind a rise and I lost the telemetry. By then - battle stations. I loaded my kit and stormed into the grassland. I searched for a whilst, but started loosing hope when I noticed that after I went over the rise, the telemetry was up again. I found the last transmitted coordinate, punched it into my cars GPS and found my quad 10 minutes later. We had a team talk(me and my quad) and decided to setup the failsafe and not assume all will be well. It is still with me and never showed that behaviour again, so I can assume human error in setting up the waypoints.
I echo Gary's question about failsafe but also ask what Transmitter/Receiver you were using?
-=Doug
This is terrible and another reason to placard our aircraft with a "If found call/contact...".
I hope you were not in a populated area. The more rural, the less chance of a finder/keeper situation... except for our friend u4eake. He was rural and the plane found the only two girls in a half kilometer radius!
My Spektrum receiver has a fail-safe setting.. and I need to set it up ASAP.
Good luck Colin!
-=Doug
Estimate the speed it was flying and how long it could have stayed in the air. That'll give you an approximate distance to where it went down. Plot a line of that length in google earth in the direction it flew away in.
Now go search in that area.
Lots of things could have happened : failsafe, apm frozen, receiver brownout of failure... Without logs we 're just guessing.
What was your failsafe set to do?
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